Tell me, those wanting to be submitted to law [hoi hūpo nomon thelontes einai], do you not listen to the law?
—Galatians 4:21
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.
The fact that anarchy can only exist in the interval between two regimes based on laws, abolishing the old to give birth to the new, does not prevent this divine interval, this vanishing instant, from testifying to its fundamental difference from all forms of the law.
—Gilles Deleuze and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Masochism
IN MANY WAYS AND NECESSARILY TO MULTIPLE ENDS, IT IS THE moment to seize upon an opportunity to (re)stage a work that the great Pasolini, by chance, could not himself fund. If so, our own putting into place of imaginary mises-en-scènes for a screenplay Pasolini left behind would immediately set in motion a complex comparative machinery, whirring away to effect an operational wonder about the now-time within which chance occasions and imaginary props afford a chance to bring a screenplay, not to mention an apostle, to life again. In fact, Pasolini wrote in his notes for a screenplay (written in 1966 and again in ’68) of a kind of
inevitability of “transposition,” continuously emerging “mutual implications,” and a retroactive demand for a new “coherence” over these “series” produced by the very unleashing of “analogy.” One senses the rhythm of a repetition already, perhaps, of that ancient literary movement whereby—from Daniel to the popular books of Enoch or the Testament of Abraham—the so-called apocalyptic text was always and necessarily imagined as having been mysteriously “sealed up” for a period of time during which the text (retroactively, to be sure) “waited” for those latter-day events and constellations that would conjure or effect its belated release, break its “seals” as the authors of Daniel or Revelation liked to say.
1
Pasolini would write in his own
Tristram Shandy of a novel,
Petrolio, that the real question both of temporality and of causality is therefore: what codes eventally emerge into operativity making events narratable, temporalized? Among other things,
Petrolio can be read as a repetition of the quest to approach the codes or
schēmata of and in the very appearing of narrativity, a quest on which linear temporal flows and coherent narrations of cause and effect often enough flounder or are inverted. Exploring the codes and conducts in question, a sort of editorial narrator intrudes onto a scene wherein
Petrolio’s Carlo finds himself perusing objects in a used bookstore in Rome, an offscreen narration (as it were) appearing, at the last, to add some additional notes as if for the improvement of a future edition of the account: “Note in pen on a page of the Argonautica (Greek-English): ‘Pay no attention! Every great writer writes only to fill the blank page with marks’ and in smaller letters: ‘Every great writer loves centones [patchworks of authorial scraps] above all. The culture of every great writer is medieval.’”
2Such is the necessary scaffolding also for, as it were, our Greek-Italian-English encounter with Pasolini’s apostle as well, whether angelic messengers for us unseal a temporality decidedly out of joint, authors and origins slipping into the void of a blank page on which are scribbled medieval centones, or whether we speak not of angels but latter-day technologies of modern literary pastiche and cinematic bricolage. In any case, the effects are the same, these assemblages of agencies, agencies as assemblages, leaving us stranded only ever to wonder about, so to speak, the software programs of culture operating behind our screens. However we situate the screenplay, the audience of Pasolini’s plan for a film about Paul encounters a decidedly scrambled temporality and a proliferation of analogical potentials.
Naturally, just like all those apocalyptic authors in this new and old movement of thought, here we too will have necessarily played something like a willing pseudepigraphic role in the restaging of a piece that never really was, our own roles bearing more directly than is usually the case all those structures of an authorial, directorial fiction. We will have written, will have staged
as if—above all
as if there were no alternatives to the ironic trickeries and spatiotemporal displacements of identity and its causes which constitute the eventualities of our (inevitably Greek-Italian-English) project. With this evocation of an ancient and returned pseudepigraphic, apocalyptic staging in mind, let’s play out the rules of the ancient genre by enacting a temporal collage which itself seems to summon so naturally a host of angelic or virtual testimonies, as if another angelic testimony were for us as well the primary staging device by which any illumination, the very light of
apokalypsis, might arrive.
RECUPERATING ANGELS
These figures have become exemplary for you, as if written for your rumination, on whom time’s ends have come.
—1 Corinthians 10:11
In a rhapsodic retrospective analysis of the rise of biopolitical immanence—which he glosses nicely as an emergence of an economy which calculates on “the soul at work”—Franco “Bifo” Berardi reflects on Italian critical theory in the 1960s and ’70’s, particularly a moment Berardi associates with 1968 and a realization that “social composition and the formation of revolutionary subjectivity can be explained neither by the idealist hypostasis of a human nature to be realized through historical action nor by the analysis of the implicit contradiction in the structure of productive relations. Neither the presupposition of a humanity needing to be redeemed, nor the analysis of capital are sufficient to understand what happens on the scene of 20th-century history, on the stage of working class struggles and of capital’s restructuring.”
3 The formulation is part of Berardi’s compelling retrospective rumination on the emergence of economies which seemed, increasingly, already to have co-opted or to have functionally incorporated some of the collective identities or cultural logics which, prior to this point, had seemed to afford a relatively stable ground outside these economies or (which comes down to the same thing) a relatively fixed end toward which these economies tended.
4 In this respect, Berardi proclaims the slow fading into oblivion or communal obsolescence of two sites from which to imagine the launch of emancipatory cultural critique. When a “presupposition of a humanity needing to be redeemed” and, indeed, the struggle for recognition
within a panlogicism of market calculation begin to appear as beliefs or operations whose time has past, a belief in a new epoch of power relations announces its arrival, one that signals in turn the necessity for new exemplars of transformation, resistance, and solidarity. In ways at least comparable to the diverse work of Mario Tronti, Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and Michael Hardt, here Berardi’s retrospective also gambles on the possibility that the newly invasive or relatively more totalizing and immanent mode of economic calculations will yield new forms of significance for productive bodies imagined as singularities.
5 Herald of new forms of life, Berardi’s analysis calls for a rethinking of soulish passion or singularity, a topos which comes to appear in this economy as neither a human factor to be imagined in an external relation to the power of capital nor as a self-enclosed identity in the name of which one could suspend the permanent revolution of capitalism for the sake of stable recognitions and proprietary limits therein.
Berardi’s retrospective bidding adieu to earlier modes of critical theory is an important interpretive messenger, so to speak, for our figuration of Pasolini’s screenplay about Paul, on which Pasolini worked between 1968 and 1974. After all, Pasolini’s piece is, from start to finish and from draft to draft, plagued by the question of desiring production, particularly as it constitutes constellations of desire, freedom, and the frames or regulating institutions whereby desire intersects with forms of speech and recognition. In this respect, the
apokalypseis or revelations of Pasolini’s Paul are integrally tied to Pasolini’s brilliantly anachronistic placement of the apostle between fascist power of the late 1930s and what Pasolini often described as an epoch of permissive power or repressive tolerance emerging in the late 1960s. Situating the apostle of a law-free evangel of liberty between epochs of fascism and consumerism itself demands further reflection on that political question which spurs important interventions throughout Pasolini’s writings (e.g.,
Lutheran Letters,
Heretical Empiricism) and his films (e.g.,
Love Meetings,
Salò), namely, does the transition from a repressive oedipal economy to an economy of relations named by the consumerist incitement to desire and enjoyment actually accomplish, socially speaking, a political form of control that a repressive fascism itself could never accomplish?
6Echoing Berardi’s analysis, for the Pasolini of the late sixties and early seventies, it was as if crucial sites of ostensibly transgressive desire had themselves been installed as integral mechanisms in a feedback loop constituting a much more invasive and effective economy of control and, as Pasolini liked to say, normalization. In a prescient wonder comparable to those which drove Michael Foucault’s early work on the history of sexuality or Jean Baudrillard’s early diagnoses of the consumerism of mass media’s sexual imaginary, Pasolini famously noted his own anxieties in the shifting cinematic significance of the represented sexual body. Evoking a recurrent phallic terminology in his work (“Tetis”), he writes: “Even though, in
The Arabian Nights, and also in the next film [
Salò] which will have ‘ideology’ as its explicit theme, I will continue to represent
even physical reality and its blazon, Tetis, I
regret the liberalizing influence that my films have contributed, in practice, to a
false liberalization, actually desired by the new reformist and permissive power, which is also the most fascist power in history.”
7 Foreshadowing Berardi’s anxieties about the incorporation of resistance and earlier struggles for recognition into the rhythms and algorithms of capitalism, Pasolini goes on to describe uncertainties about whether, with “the last years of the sixties” the political gamble on “the body” as “the only preserved reality” in relation to capitalist normalization or governmentality itself was not giving way to a suspicion that the erotic body was caught up in a machinery of normalization feeding directly into the ritual maintenance of new identities even better adapted to a “neocapitalist” or consumerist economy (246).
As if by some impishly perverse agency, even new thresholds to which Pasolini himself had brought Italian cinema seemed to him to have collapsed into a mere simulacrum of transgressive resistance to normalization. Pasolini here points repeatedly to his successful release of a cinematic image of a “sexual organ in detail and close-up,” an evental cinematic threshold which constitutes, by any measure, a new limit of scandalizing representation or at any rate an “enormous cock on the screen” (246, 247). But this transgressive breakthrough in the struggle for the representation of the desiring body had begun to signify for Pasolini only the flame of a potlatch ceremony, precisely the destruction of a transformative excess, its sacrifice rather than its emancipatory conjuration into presence.
This image is an important one for our constellation of apocalyptic signs and apostolic narrations, one we should keep in mind when we recall Pasolini’s Paul stranded, as it were, between ’38 and ’68. Pasolini is very clear on this point, claiming in his statements about sexual imagery in cinema that, both sexually and politically speaking, the rebels of the latter regime of power are anything but what they appear: “Today, the youth are nothing but monstrous and ‘primitive’ masks of a new sort of initiation (negative in pretence only) into the consumerist ritual” (246). Indeed, picking up on Pasolini’s suggestion that this experience of his own work pushed him toward cinematic presentations of sex with “‘
ideology’
as its explicit theme” (my emphasis), it is noteworthy that he foreshadows
Salò in such a light, namely, as a fascism which is indistinguishable from a brutal command to enjoy. As Andrea Righi remarks on the film as part of his genealogy of biopolitics: “Pasolini’s use of sexuality in
Salò is crucial to understanding the consequences of this false idea of freedom. In consumer society individuals are at the same time victims and victimizers; they take advantage and are simultaneously exploited by a system that is based on an endless cycle of production and consumption.”
8 Such certainly seems to have been Pasolini’s apocalyptic diagnosis, and it is here, situated by a demand to understand a relatively more seamless economy of production and consumption, that the filmmaker and critical cultural theorist sets to work the conjuration of a return of the Pauline legacy.
In the late sixties and early seventies, these and similar diagnoses of a harrowing transformation of the ontologies of power and resistance began to circulate throughout Europe as if a climate change were beginning to be registered. The sensitive were charting similar alterations in temperature within Paris, for example, and in ways that constitute an intriguing further context within which to articulate the emergence of Pasolini’s Paul. It was in his seminar of 1969–70 that Jacques Lacan began with a rather astonishing statement, one clearly directed against popular understandings of May ’68 and its aftermath: “What analysis shows, if it shows anything at all … is very precisely the fact that we don’t ever transgress. Sneaking around is not transgressing. Seeing a door half-open is not the same as going through it. We shall have the occasion to come back to what I am introducing now—there is no transgression here, but rather an irruption, a falling into a field, of something not unlike
jouissance—a surplus.”
9 This evocation of a discursive world without transgression marks a subtle shift in Lacan’s thinking about power, even as it opens a new lecture series which developed some of Lacan’s most compelling insights about the castration, lack, or nonexistence of the big Other as the final frame or guarantee for judgements about power relations.
Reconfiguring earlier diagnostics in light of what he often describes as a kind of “experience” of newly emerging cultural logics, it is here on the “other side of psychoanalysis” that Lacan diagnosed an oddly
ambivalent supplementation of the lost Other, that lost cause in relation to which we might “desire to be submitted” (as Paul says in the initial citation above: ‘Tell me, those wanting to be submitted to law, do you not listen to the law?’). Whether or not we would hope to be so submitted in order to ground antagonism and rebellion or obedient compliance would make little difference. In either case, the big Other’s nonexistence itself abandons both would-be transgressors and rebellious revolutionaries alike to a difficult necessity of rethinking the very nature of desire in relation to cultural or symbolic authority. The transgressively desiring body, to recall Pasolini, is here in Lacan’s analysis no more a “preserved reality” outside the structures of power than it was in the later writings of the filmmaker. In Lacan’s discussion of a freedom now difficult to conceptualize or place, we are forced to manage an excessive weight of the immanence of desire in its relation to a merely virtual big Other. We are forced to manage the weight of this relation precisely because we do so without the shelter or justification of a belief that the law, the father, or the repressive regimes of money or power exist, precisely, apart from this ritualized investment in them. In such a scenario it is structurally impossible to distinguish transgressive desire from Pasolini’s “‘primitive’ masks” donned for a ritual through which we would have conjured the presence of the Other in question. Without eliding genuine antagonisms between the different theorists, the same
problem of desire (which is to say a very similar “problem of the law”), as an awareness of the structural or economic ambiguity of transgression, marks other watershed contributions that emerged at the same moment in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (
Anti-Oedipus, 1972), Jean-Francois Lyotard (
Libidinal Economy, 1974), Jacques Derrida (
Dissemination, 1972), and Jean Baudrillard (
The Consumer Society, 1970).
10THE ANCIENT PAUL IN AN OPEN ECONOMY OF SURPLUS VALUES
It is worth reflecting in this respect on the way that the Paulinism of Jacques Lacan, so to speak, has often been associated with his interest, during the earlier 1959–60 seminar, with Paul’s text of Romans 7, a form of thinking that has shifted in slight but important ways by the time of his lectures on “the other side of psychoanalysis” ten years later. Recall that in the ancient text of Paul the apostle imagines an economy whereby a perverse mode of power operates behind the back of an otherwise docile or submissive imaginary self, this hidden operation functioning to effect the self’s problematic splitting or doubling. While it is not the place fully to explore the implications of this fact, recall as well that it is possible that Paul played out this splitting of the subject in Romans 7 as a repetition of a theatrical tableau of Medea, whose desire to act violently against other impulses within her became a favored touchstone for Hellenistic philosophical diagnoses of the “problem of passion.”
11 It is in this mode that Paul writes: “So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Abject person that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (Romans 7:21–24).
A long history of Christian readings of a peculiar passage in Paul’s letter to the Romans about law and the production of transgression have oriented themselves by a supersessionist narrative that unhelpfully imagined what were in actuality Paul’s partisan Jewish interventions
within a vibrantly diverse first-century Judaism to constitute (instead) the “Christian”
break with Judaism. As Paul never called himself a Christian and would have refused the supersessionist implications of such a terminological distinction, neither the terminology nor the teleologies underlying this traditional narrative prove illuminating for contemporary encounters with Paul. Nevertheless, this traditional orientation has often functioned very effectively to exclude all other modes of thinking about ancient or (by analogy) contemporary identity in relation to prohibition, or about the plurality and limits of different legal codes, none of which topics were either far from ancient discourses on
nomos or irrelevant for latter-day reflections on power.
12For our purposes it is useful to allow Romans 7 to operate as a machine with which to think the problem Righi articulates, the idea of an economy of a consumer society whereby the producer/consumer is
simultaneously victim and victimizer, and this because of a capacity—as the ancient Paul put it—“to seize a chance opportunity” (7:8, cf.
aphormēn de labousa) to create a surplus desire or excess of relation within the otherwise fixed poles of the juridical scene. As we will see, this comparative constellation articulates an impish mode whereby an open economy of power relations can be formulated as the possibility for any of its moments to be subtracted from the dominant form of structured power, a potential which ends up meaning that the form of power itself
only emerges retroactively, therefore, in relation to this (open) operation of exceptionality or surplus. Put differently, Paul’s quirky articulation of what is often traditionally named the theologico-political “problem of the law” in Romans 7 emerges hand in hand with an epoch in which capitalist power as production of surplus operates at once expansionistically but also eventally as an emergent production of surplus relationalities that deforms earlier models of cause and effect.
In the text of Romans, notice the way in which the dialectical standstill or suspension of agency within the juridical economy does not simply operate in the splitting or doubling of the inner man/wretched man of this scene, fissuring his agency into antagonistic strategists (cf. 7:21–24). Much more striking than this Platonic splitting of agencies, I think, is the way there is here clearly a matching split or duplication of nomos as well, as if the agency of nomos itself appears as both prohibition and transgression of the same. In this passage there is apparently hit upon a “law” of law itself, as if having “discovered” a law within law or a code inside of code, a little shadow of law producing its opposite, resistance to it, active rebellion and criminality rather than docile acquiescence to appropriate limitations. “So I find this law: when I want to do the good, evil lies ready to hand…. [That is] I see in my members another law (heteron nomon) at war with the law of my mind (nous)” (cf. 7:21f.). Here the very impasse or obstruction within the otherwise smooth functioning of power in a system of juridical compliance itself comes to name another nomos, namely, the nomos of the way the arrival of the commandment is always a repetition of the “springing to life again of sin” (cf. 7:9), a return of the repressed which displaces the “I” from itself, effectively “killing” it (cf. 7:10). And this displacement and splitting of the I, we should not miss, emerges from a “chance” that is susceptible of being grasped as a “production” (cf. kateirgasato 7:8) of a surplus capable of inverting the value of the intentions of the actor in question. The “problem of law” as the “problem of passion” in Romans 7 returns forcefully at a moment when new types of production of surplus value seem, precisely, susceptible to a value-inverting seizure in an economy that grows by transgressing its own limits.
It is this little shadow of law, this excessive surplus within law, which, in this intriguing passage, effects a doubling and self-suspension of juridical authority as an imagined form of emancipation.
13 Elsewhere in his writings, Paul, playing the role of overheated partisan, seems much more comfortable than he does in Romans 7 with presenting the juridical economy of
nomos solely as an agency of enslavement or as an apparatus for the production of transgressors. One could certainly wonder on reading his letter to the Galatians whether Paul imagined the juridical economy to found itself
only by way of the manufacture of criminality as the exception to juridical norms (see, e.g., Galatians 3:10–13, 19, 22f., 4:3, 9). In the later letter to the Romans, however, Paul seems more intent on supplementing the otherwise short-circuited, suspended, or exhausted polarities of agency into which the juridical economy seems to have fallen. Indeed, note just how in the Romans text “sin” is relied upon as a crucial supplementary agent, this “third” agency being imagined as the localizing
cause of the displacements of activity and passivity within the otherwise short-circuited functioning of juridical economy. In what many commentators over the centuries have even imagined as a kind of response to possible views of Paulinism emerging from the more trenchant earlier letter to the Galatians, Paul presents a virtual conversation with an interlocutor who asks: “So what are we saying, that the law is sin?” to which he responds: No! Rather, it is
sin which “seizes an opportunity” within
nomos, this extralegal act of partisanal warfare itself yielding the perversely split (and perhaps Medean) scenario described in the seventh chapter of Romans.
However, despite Paul’s efforts to stabilize the otherwise destabilized juridical economy by way of the naming of “sin” as a supplemental agency, the nameable
cause of disturbance, note that the
function of the agency of sin within this Pauline tableau is simply the function of the power of exception making through a potentially productive surplus and its appropriation which displaces the status of otherwise-perceived laboring roles. We might read, therefore, “sin” as the retroactive appendage of the “chance opportunity” itself, that agent always already the effect of a more primordial zone from which arises the potential for partisan co-optations, rogue attacks, and potentially revolutionary emancipations alike. Consider that it is no accident that Paul appropriates in this passage the favored lingo of “seizing a chance” from a panoply of Greek texts on military history. Random occurrences, chance encounters, enable the polemically inclined to “seize” or “take” the opportunity afforded by chance, transforming the nature of sovereignty in a kairological moment of opportunity that effects new orders of power. The seizure of chance in these texts constitutes a kind of Schmittian act of appropriation, though one not at all merely at the disposal of regnant powers. On the contrary, regnant power maintains itself by immunizing itself against the arrival of these unformed moments of chance. As the first-century Jewish historian puts it, much more effective than defeating one’s political enemies is to immure the current situation of power against the “chance” (
aphormē) of viable contest in the first place.
14 Paul’s exposition of works and the weaponization of surplus against would-be workers here fits such descriptions exactly. Note, for example, that Paul’s scene here emerges against the backdrop of a lack of power in law—he names its status as
adunaton—opening the way to understanding the productive economy of commandment as one constituted through an originary “weakness” or inoperativity within the (active, sovereign) law—(passive, docile) flesh pairing (cf. 8.3,
to gar adunaton tou nomou en hō ēsthenei dia tēs sarkos).
It is only at first glance, therefore, that Paul’s tale seems like it sides with traditional sovereignty, as if bemoaning the weakness of effective order and longing for a moment when the role of
nomos in a representational economy of commandment could be stabilized. Many commentators, docile sorts themselves perhaps, assume that Paul
merely laments the deformation of the sovereign command of
nomos at the hands of the radical partisanship and interventionism of “sin.” But this is to miss the implications of the way Paul has here made sin a partisan properly speaking, postrepresentational and insurrectionist, what Paul himself calls (in a line of great interest to Jacques Lacan and George Bataille) sin’s manifestation through the (inoperativity or surplus activity of the) commandment to be “sin beyond measure” (
hina genētai kath’
huperbolēn hamartōlos hē hamartia dia tēs diathēkēs).
15 Here, too, we should pay attention to the specific modes in which Paul maps his discussions of sin’s partisanship onto the seizure of the chance motif, a motif that was never in the ancient Mediterranean contexts
simply about the anxiety of the powerful to immunize their situation against it. Seizing the
aphormēn or chance was also, we should never forget, about the capacity for transformative insurrections, a discourse of partisans without acceptable political representation, none of which was far from the advocate of a brutally murdered messianic figure.
Jacob Taubes earlier intervened in the political history of Pauline reception to develop a genealogical subversion of the dictatorial exceptionalism of Carl Schmitt, Taubes looking to Paulinism for a mode of attending to transformative contingency or the (as if
ex nihilo)
surprise and openness of transformative sovereignty, just as Schmitt did. But Paulinism, Taubes argued, enables a way of attending to the same rogue potentials, except that one could think them, he stated famously, “from below” rather than from the position of Schmittian institutions or dicators. In this project Taubes never picked up on some of the things we are describing here, including the rather astonishingly inverted Schmittianism we might find in Paul’s use here of Schmitt’s beloved theological term of the
katechon or “suppressive” capacity of power.
16 At Romans 7:6, for example, it is through the community’s adamant identification with the criminalized and effectively suppressed messianic figure that they “have died” to the effective grasp of
nomos generally. The Paulinist insurgency is described as excepting itself from the juridical economy, the crucified having thus subtracted themselves from the effective force that, he writes, “suppressed them” (
nuni de katērgēthēmen apo tou nomou apothanontes en hō kateichometha). Far from the suppressive power of rule against chaos, here it is the Paulinists who have, precisely, subtracted themselves from the suppressive power of the legal order.
Far from being a “Christian” break from Judaism, here Paul’s rhetoric is in keeping with a rich and diverse tradition of early Jewish partisanship and contestation of inherited norms of all sorts. Note, for example, that the first-century commentator and philosopher Philo of Alexandria could also imagine that a divine law installs within itself the aphormē, as if Philo, too, were reflecting on the possibility of a divinely sanctioned chance (chance as divine sanction) for the deformation of identity, causality, and the economy of commandment. Thus, Philo writes, in legal traditions of scripture, strangers are given a “chance” or opportunity to appropriate legally those goods and rights which were not officially or originally afforded them because of their identity as outsiders (cf. Special Laws 2.118.2). Philo also narrates key moments in the surprising scriptural deformation or revolutionary transformation of the identity of the people by way of the terminology of chance, as when a non-Israelite prostitute becomes the crucial bearer of the people’s legacy, indeed the very “origin” of their justly constituted polis (cf. On Virtues 222.6). Similarly, identifying with the partisan against repressive power structures, Josephus, too, understands that what was the eventual destiny of Moses (to be the cause of both the downfall of the Egyptians and an emancipatory exodus of the Israelites) nevertheless had to occur in a moment of chance openness to transformation (namely, the invasion of Egypt by the Ethiopians). Josephus’s Moses, just like Paul’s sin, effects the transformation of agencies, territories, and sovereignties by “seizing the opportunity,” both writers appropriating the same Greek terminology of sovereignty and partisanship (cf. Antiquities of the Jews 2.239.1).
In other words, the seizure of chance is itself the unformed, deforming moment in the economy of identity, sovereignty, and commandment whereby radical transformation may be effected. Or, as I have already intimated, one might even say the drama of divinity in these ancient texts is
nothing but an attentiveness to this open space of transformation, almost a monotheistic variation of the question of causality and openness that the polytheistic traditions deified as
tuchē (or chance). After all, the potential seizure of chance is at once imagined as both the origin and possible revolution of modes of life, the singular aura or surplus value of which has always been the stuff of religion. To add one further genealogical twist, we might even say that, in keeping with another of the ancient meanings of seizable
aphormē, in Paul’s confounding of the efficacy of
nomos by way of the chance opportunity of this economy’s inversion we have a witness to that “
capital”
which funded both the promise and the debts of ancient religiosity, the surplus value or excessive forcefulness of its stability
and its openness to radical transformation.
17In light of this ancient discourse, it is worth remembering Pasolini’s sense of a catastrophe at work in the inversion of an image of cinematic rebellion into a form of normalizing participation within a more diffuse and consumerist political economy. It is worth thinking, in other words, that whether one intends to fulfill the law or to transgress it, there is “another law” in excess of law capable of subverting both intentions. Both moments of relating to the juridical or representational capacities of a “code” are traversed by a monstrous opening whereby a kairological chance apparently could be “seized” at any moment, and it would make little difference whether this seizure renders the obedient as transgressors or the transgressive the new obedient. This is the Paul of the underground current of a new materialism, and perhaps someday we will understand that Paulinism has always been part of that archive of contingencies, partisanships, and their always contingently discovered “laws.” What else is that partisan Paul’s own seizing upon what could otherwise no doubt
only be read as the effective operation of imperial juridical power, namely, a Roman crucifixion of yet another serial messianic figure within first-century Jewish culture? As discussed above, Paul latched onto the suppressed aspect of his messianic figure in a way that can only be described as doggedly obsessive: “I intended to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and this one
as crucified (
kai touton estaurōmenon; 1 Corinthians 2:2). Or, in that inimitable style of the Paulinist partisan: “You stupid Galatians! Who has cast a spell on you, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was clearly performed
as crucified!”(Galatians 3:1).
Remember that we should hesitate before we retroject later Jewish and Christian rationalizations of Paul’s seizure of this (to say the least, not so promising) chance opportunity. Paul’s appropriations of a messianic figure who was both humiliated and executed by occupying forces was much more interventionist, fragmentary, and surprisingly open-ended than these later justifications (and, often enough, co-opations) recognize. In so hesitating to allow latter-day ideologues to rewrite the risky, tentative performance of the earlier moment, we are more likely to attend to the modes in which Paul and his cohort struggled, essentially, to fold the effective operation of imperial power back onto itself, as if to hollow out a bubble of unsurveilled powerlessness within effective power itself. “No way will I ever boast except in the cross of our lord, Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and me to the world” (Galatians 6:14); “But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him…. Consider yourselves dead … but alive” (Romans 6:8, 11). In dying to law by their dogged identification with the crucified, Paul claimed that the believers had been subtracted from the suppressive or katechontic power of the juridical order.
To put the matter differently, was not the secret of Paulinism already that his own
kairos or now-time of a surprising event (cf. Romans 5:6, 9:9, 13:11), the moment which for him constituted the transformative power of a new age, was precisely in keeping with (or formally the same as)
the operation of sin’s “seizing an opportunity”? This is the case despite the way that Paul
likewise attributes to the aleatory or supplemental forcefulness of a chance perversion of efficacy within “the commandment” a structure of agency or causality by invoking the name “sin.” Put more dramatically, we should not be misled by the ostensibly gut-wrenching, soul-searching rhetoric of a split subject: “Who will rescue me from my split subjectivity?” (cf. 7:14–25). After all, it was only because Paul’s catastrophically criminalized Christ was taken by the apostle as the messiah’s having “been made sin for us” that Paul was to have anything creatively emancipatory to say about his Christ at all (cf. 2 Corinthians 5:16–19, 21). It was this suppressed messiah which was for him the exemplary clue that the merely believing may “become” outside the economy of the manufacture of representative transgressors. It was, in other words, not only sin which seemed to have learned the affinity between partisanship, transformation, and seizing on a subversive chance. If the
nomos of the current order makes transgressors of you, you might consider how transgression itself speaks doubly as the end of transgression, even as a kind of redemption to be seized upon.
My assertion is that it is the very topic of a free-floating
surplus of production within the economy of power relations which hovers above
both the ancient Paul
and his return in late capitalism. This is a genealogical puzzle whose effects remain to be worked through. Nevertheless, playing the good neo-Paulinist, Lacan was inviting his would-be revolutionary students to a similar mode of thought as Paul’s, certainly no less perverse, rethinking the role of desire within machinations of power and resistance with implications we should not miss. For example, Gil Anidjar has given a very nice Schmittian reading of Paul, focused on Paul’s politely diminutive little question: “In telling you the truth, have I become your enemy?” (Galatians 4:16).
18 As Jacob Taubes tried to do earlier, Anidjar here forges an important link between Paulinism and different types of Schmittian exceptionalism that have yet to be worked through in depth. Above all, we should note the many
modes in which the
kairos-obsessed partisan conjures an apostolic
polemos from within inherited forms of habituated activity or from representative figures of the larger established communities. As Philo of Alexandria explores interestingly, the taking of inference or interpretive tack within a tradition is a result of a seizing upon the
aphormē of a chance (cf.
Who is the Heir of Divine Things? 300.3ff.).
19 This is the same tale that the early Derrida, as we have seen, would name the swerve of
clinamen and the very “materialism” of his early theory of “writing.” In keeping with Philo’s standardly Jewish hermeneutic tradition, it is this partisan tack whose inferences split, divide, and solicit the new and surprising (or, perhaps, the monstrous) which we see everywhere in Paul. Thus being circumcised in moments of Paul’s polemic becomes, somehow, a “cutting oneself off” from messianic benefit (cf.
katērgēthēte apo christou); the beneficent father Abraham mutates into an anarchic “father” of an impossibly generated people, genealogy replaced by an aggressively virtual form of lineage constituted, as it were, only “before” the representations and stabilities law (cf. Galatians 5:4, 3:16–18, 29, 4:31). The Paulinist orgy of disproportion also raises its head when Paul asserts that the shining aura of Moses down from Sinai was veiled, yes, but veiled only
because of an embarrassment about the fact that this shining “
glory”
was already fading away (cf. 2 Corinthians 3:13).
20Like Lacan’s Joyce, Paul the partisan repeats tradition while deforming it, deforms it while repeating it, following the singular declinations and inflections of the seizure of chance (and, as we have pointed out, in keeping with his Jewish hermeneutical contemporaries).
21 For the Paulinist, the messianic age as much as “sin” was capable of “seizing an opportunity,” and this to turn agency and agencies against themselves, splitting their operations into conflictual multiplicities of identity and radically altering their capacity to maintain themselves as hegemonic forms of power in the process. Playing the role of a kind of “sin without measure” in relation to the effective economies of “commandment” constituting Roman imperial domination over the intractably rebellious Jews, for example, Paul declares that the Roman transformation of a would-be messiah into a form of stupidity and failure should itself be grasped as a moment of divine wisdom and triumph of the undying divinity of the partisan (cf. 1 Corinthians 1), indeed a divinity that has given rise to a new “city-council” (
ekklēsia) of the undead, a council consisting of those who act as if
already dead so that they might live beyond the “suppressive” or katechontic economy of
nomos. Carried away by the unending, undying life of this very gesture, Paul even boasts that if the “rulers” knew what they were doing when they put down this messianic figure they wouldn’t have done it (1 Corinthians 2:8). His point here is not simply that the rulers were “mistaken” in their crucifixion of the rebel from Palestine. Much more in keeping with his argument the issue is rather that, in their very enactment of imperial control and legal condemnation of a messianic figure from a dissident state, the “rulers” became susceptible to the doubling, splitting, undying power of the divinity of emancipatory partisanship. Roman imperial power, too, knows not what it does, living as it does off of a surplus or excess that is only imagined to be owned.
The analogies between Paulinism and the “problem of power” in the late sixties are perhaps most vibrant when imagined as part of a pastiche of the multiplicity of modes in which seizures of chance afford new modes of undoing the power of power, rendering ineffective the coding of codes or reversing the value of effective history. In a word, it is in the generalization of the role of the partisan with the unregulatable development of “neocapitalist” economies that solicits a “return” of Paul and all those topoi of life inhering in death, a decree of salvation attaching to the imperial condemnation of a criminal, and so forth. As a figure of thought and analogical provocation, Paul returns as a peculiarly forceful touchstone within an economy whereby we are all subjects of, and subject to, the capacity to seize on a chance opportunity in order to destabilize the very force of normativity.
SEIZURES OF CHANCE; OR, THE CAPITALIZATION OF MASTERY
As one last angelic/analogical testimony, one last witness for the illumination of Pasolini’s Paul, note how Lacan’s 1969–70 lecture course mentioned before signals a subtle rewiring of Lacan’s previous statements about the authority of law in relation to transgression, say, in his seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis (1959–60). In the earlier lectures Lacan’s attention was not so much on the economies whereby transgressive jouissance feeds back into structures of authority and control, though the implication is already there, but rather on the modes whereby jouissance only appears as such in relation to its prohibitive opposite:
We are, in fact, led to the point where we accept the formula that without a transgression there is no access to
jouissance, and, to return to Saint Paul, that that is precisely the function of the Law. Transgression in the direction of
jouissance only takes place if it is supported by the oppositional principle, by the forms of the Law. If the paths to
jouissance have something in them that dies out, that tends to make them impassable, prohibition, if I may say so, becomes its all-terrain vehicle, its half-track truck, that gets it out of the circuitous routes that lead man back in a roundabout way toward the rut of a short and well-trodden satisfaction.
22
By the time we get to the post-’68 discussion of the Other in psychoanalysis the specific Lacanian inflection of the “problem of law” has shifted in an important way, indeed in keeping with the same shift in logics that marks Pasolini’s anxiety about 1968 as a more effectively fascistic power than 1938. Lacan’s intervention from “the other side of psychoanalysis” ends, rather, with a repetition of the initial suggestion that “analysis shows” us power structures marked not by
transgressions but by
detours of power.
23 This shift in focus is perhaps flagged best by the invocation, at the beginning of the latter seminar, of a world
without transgression. The concepts are not entirely new, but inflected differently. Indeed, Lacan refers to “an experience” that his theoretical modelings repeat in a different mode (164). This experience is, in turn, in keeping with a sense that what he calls “the master’s discourse” effectively co-opts opposition because it has “needed to go beyond certain limits” in order to maintain the aura, the authority, the effectivity of its “name” (167f). This transformation beyond “limits” which themselves constituted the recognizability of the master-slave dialectic Lacan calls a “capital mutation … which gives the master’s discourse its capitalist style” (168). Put differently: “In the master’s discourse, for instance, it is effectively impossible that there be a master who makes the entire world function. Getting people to work is even more tiring, if one really has to do it, than working oneself. The master never does it. He gives a sign, the master signifier, and everybody jumps. That’s where you have to start, which is, in effect, completely impossible. It’s tangible every day” (174).
Consistently within the later writings of Lacan, the more pressing issue is that—with the disappearance of the sovereignty of the lawgiver or the big Other—paradoxically there is a
proliferation of the modes of control whereby a virtual Other might anchor itself. As she puts it in her excellent discussion of the radical immanence of a desiring economy—which she glosses, through Spinoza and Lacan alike, as “secular causality”—A. Kiarina Kordela writes, “To say that the subject is the cause of itself amounts to the assertion that
everything can be the cause of the subject, under the precondition that the subject ‘agrees’ that this is its cause.”
24Differently put, it seems
at just this point that the problematic appears 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.”
25 If the sovereign (divine) monarch, the paternal law that functions as the system’s fulcrum, leverage point, or external ground is removed—Lacan countered—then the problem is rather that
nothing is permitted. Without the external measure of repressive prohibition, how would one even distinguish between muling subservience and bold transgression, and in relation to what structure of power? Rather than the link to Romans 7, perhaps here the intriguingly retroactive textual connection to make would be to point out that it is Paul who opposes grace/faith and work/ law in order to demonize the law in Galatians (as enslaving, as a curse, as given by questionable angels rather than by God, as mere calculation, and so on), only to turn around in Romans to declare: “Do we overthrow the law by faith? No way. Rather, we uphold the law” (Romans 3:31). The constellation of Pauline contradictions is intriguing in the sense that Lacan’s problem here is the way the
withdrawal of a localizable, representable prohibition only makes it possible for a massive influx of other forms of coercion and mastery, all of which can appear (retroactively) to have played the role of cause. As Lacan puts it, such is the “capitalization” of the (earlier) role of the “master.”
As the Karamazov story and its Lacanian inversion imply, 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. And just here, between the utter loss of a site of resistance and a paradoxical explosion of new life, appears Pasolini’s Paul. At any rate, Lacan believed that the new economies of power precluded anything like a Christian or post-Christian “good news” of the
overcoming of the order of law, particularly as an anarchic freedom, as it were, beyond the law. As he quips, “It is certainly not as an attempt to explain what sleeping with the mother means that the murder of the father is introduced into Freudian doctrine” (120). Put differently, the promise of analysis is certainly
not that “in some way psychoanalysis frees us from the law” (119). Indeed, it is difficult not to hear echoes of a comparison between Paul and Oedipus when Lacan describes Oedipus as having transgressed the limits of power or
nomos only to discover that, without these limits he has no buffer between himself and the
lack of power which constitutes power as such. In Oedipus’s conversion, so to speak, to a life beyond law, “what happens to him is not that the scales fall from his eyes, but that his eyes fall from him like scales…. In other words … the essence of the master’s position is to be castrated” (121).
Stranded between ’38 and ’68, forced to reconceptualize power and emancipation in a world without the legitimation of founding origins or assured ends, Paul returns as a participant indication of a world in which power increasingly resides in the surplus or excess over the representational. Pasolini’s Paul returns, in this context, as both the herald of radical openings, ecstasies of new ages always about to appear, but just as much as the foreclosure of the open. No wonder Pasolini sometimes imagines the author of Acts, that first soporific institutional co-optation of a singular Pauline partisanship, to be a satanic figure. This is perhaps power’s secret, as if its own weakness were the most effective form of conjuring ritual supplementation and an investment of credit or faith from ritual adherents (whether transgressive or subservient would make no difference). After all, there is participation in the ritual maintenance of the powerless master or else a more direct facing the powerlessness itself, the master’s or ours.