—Eusebius, Ecclesiastical Histories (2.26.6, 7)
READ SIMILARLY TO NIETZSCHE, FREUD FOR ME WAS CORRECT inasmuch as he understood Paulinism as a kind of counterpoint to the “religion” of the people of Moses. But Freud was still not sleuthing hard enough, not doing enough dreamwork on the force and forms of cultural memory, when he considered Paul himself as actually having instituted the operative break between Judaism and Christianity. For all his shrewd reflections on revolution, institutionalization, and its repressions, Freud still read Paul like Martin Luther, participating in an aged panoply of a triumphalistically anti-Jewish and implicitly pro-imperial tradition inasmuch as he finds in Paul a founder of a new religion, Christianity, which was in essential (read ideal) respects, not Jewish. Of course, Pauline Christianity was imagined by Freud as internally or dialectically related to Judaism in the sense that he imagined Paul as operationalizing repressed Jewish guilt for the murder of its patriarch. Or Freud’s Paul promised a holism of identity as salvation, a promise Freud interpreted as an infantile fantasy for security that only operates against the backdrop of the very “Judaism” this fantasy would disavow as its insecure, unsaved alter ego. Fair enough, shrewd enough, but once again, that the very split between these “religions” and these stable economies of redemption would itself need to be excavated for its own mode of splitting repressed and represented authority was not an issue tackled in Moses and Monotheism. Like Nietzsche, that the archē of Christianity, its “greatest son” or its “original,” was so split seems not to have been on the table. The result is that Freud’s perennially provocative intervention into the theologico-political memory of the West, appearing at nightfall of an unprecedented anti-Jewish violence, insinuates a dispossessingly foreign element into the founder of Judaism even as it leaves Paul, as a genealogical counterpoint, relatively unscathed. “To deny a people the man whom it praises as the greatest of its sons is not a deed to be undertaken lightheartedly—especially by one belonging to that people [Einem Volkstum den Mann abzusprechen, den es als den größten unter seinen Söhnen rühmt, ist nichts, was man gern oder leichthin unternehmen wird, zumal wenn man selbst diesem Volke angehört].”
What I have explored in the course of this book, however, are some of the ways that, on the other side of the sublimating narrative of “Christian origins” there appears an apostle as a Jewish partisan or sectarian whose singular project alternately failed and passed away before its being simultaneously buried and beatified by a great machinery of Christendom and its pop Platonic narration of “Christian origins.” Subtracted from these types of Eusebian foundations, it is my assertion that Paul becomes a crucial figure in a very different archive, one we hit upon following a path nominated as an “underground current” of a new “materialism.” Along this path we found in Pauline texts indications of new figures of a kind of materialist spirituality or an immanent religiosity that—by definition—remains a profound affront to a Western tradition which has so loved to imagine Paul, rather (and for all kinds of reasons), as a proclaimer of a transcendent frame, metaphysical guarantee, or teleological baptism of the brutalities of effective history.
For us, Nietzsche’s critique of this eventual constellation organized in and under the name of Paul in this tradition was apt: Paulinism really has become, and not just recently, a “Platonism for the masses.” But there are—and continue to be—occlusions, elisions, repressions, and murders in the co-optation of Paul into this metaphysical framework which threaten, always threaten, to burst loose. And (does anyone need proof of it today?), when the mechanisms break down or shake loose in the machinery of a dominant form of enculturated Christendom, then the breakdown of this labyrinthine apparatus allows all manner of economies, all manner of governances of self and others to spin in different orbits. Such things are more important and wide reaching than most of us have yet begun to realize.
At a fundamental level then my genealogical gamble here is simple. It is indeed possible to shove beyond the imagined Paulinism of Nietzsche and Freud alike, a gesture which has in important respects not yet been accomplished by some extraordinarily important recent philosophers and cultural critics in recent decades. In doing so, I argue, we challenge an essential story of what a good Constantinian like Eusebius would call “Christian origins,” with the result that one of the stable narrative touchstones or justifications of a popularized Western metaphysics begin to open onto new territories as well. Nietzsche rightly diagnosed both Western ontotheology and Western ontotheology’s obsession with Paul as its founding figure, its most effective purveyor of a Platonism for the masses. As Nietzsche himself once wrote, however: “The most enlightened get only as far as liberating themselves from metaphysics and looking back on it from above: whereas here too, as in the hippodrome, at the end of the track it is necessary to turn the corner.”1 Nietzsche’s apothegmatic image has always haunted me in relation to his own excoriation of Paul. Fine, excoriate Paul as the founding disseminator of a Western metaphysics in which a belief in transcendent guarantee effects a “higher swindle” on everyday life, a life which in turn becomes fleeced of its own gravity, its own significance. But, in order really to “turn the corner” in the immanent structures of recurrence constituting this life, why is it that we would at all be interested in reading Paul—even antagonistically—as the “one who knows” or even as the one who thinks he knows, about the economic transactions of transcendent guarantee or stable Platonic idealities? Do we really assume that Paul was nothing like Freud’s Moses, that Egyptian, as if (to play on the Egyptians of Hegel and Lacan as well) Paul were no mystery to himself? One of the uncomfortable questions of this book, which I posed to Nietzsche, to Freud, to Althusser, to Derrida, to Foucault, and to Deleuze is just this: why are
we reading Paul in such a docile, traditional way? What are
we preserving or protecting in
not exposing Paul, as it were, to the unjustified, unsaved—or, simply, immanent—forms of always singular life in which we claim to believe? In each instance, I argue, this way of reading a biblical text (perhaps above all a biblical text!) is to set oneself up as
wanting to escape metaphysics, all the while preserving oneself as the one able to look down on this moribund condition, or over at it, as if it were an object, a given entity, or an alter ego. And so these thinkers have continued to read Paul protectively, continued to cover him up in the glass of a museum casing, and this in order to guarantee an important distinction between their postmetaphysical present and a pop Platonic religiosity they rightly disavow.
AKHENATON, MEET MR. APOSTLE
Like Freud, I gamble everything on a quirkily political potential of the new subjective or psychic economy as it comes to grips with the possibility that its beatified or sublimated imago was always a corpse hidden in plain sight. To say it like a psychoanalytic kerygma, here we are invited to join an unruly alliance of those who believe that to tinker with Paul, as it was to tinker with Moses, is to monkey with a profoundly and perennially invested lever of identity. As always, this kerygma necessitates a genealogical intervention, and it is time for us today to consider more seriously the modes in which a reworking of the figure of Paul implicate both ourselves and our forbears in an Adam/New Adam story for our own moment. At the very least, we must realize that to reconfigure Paul in the cultural memory of this tradition will always have implied a shifting within four terms that are simply too intimately oriented by or implicated in the cultural memory of Paul for it to be otherwise. These names, the West, Europe, Christianity, and Judaism, are all alike too intimately, awkwardly related to the history of this figure, and none will remain indifferent to its cultural repositioning.
If Freud dreams in Moses and Monotheism (Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion) of a coming biblical interpreter, the psychoanalyst imagines this tracker of unintended communications as all kitted out in the tricks of the detective trade, above all with an attentiveness to the void of omission or gap, coupled with an odd interest in “disturbing repetitions,” inexpressive singularities or atoms, like a nervous twitch that points somewhere only ever by repeating itself. In this sense, Freud’s Bible in the cultural memory of the West will always have been tied to a hesitatingly ambivalent anxiety, which defines the self-maintenance of a singularity that could always be otherwise, communities of readers constitutively exposed to the possibility of haunting communiqués that were never intended to be sent. When the maintenance of canonical boundaries starts to involve unintended refrains from agents unknown, then definitionally we must wonder whether there is a body buried somewhere.
Freud’s revisionist narration of Moses as the sublimated Jewish imago of a murdered Egyptian was therefore structurally familiar to the analyst. Familiar with the scene, he knew that voids and repetitions are echoes—so many miniature or minimal afterlives—of the stilled heartbeat from the corpse immured in the wall, perhaps of the dismembered body stuffed underneath the floorboards, all the more a “trophy” (as Eusebius acknowledges) because so blazingly silent, secret, hidden in relation to what it could indicate to those catching a glimpse of it. Whether such corpses were dismembered and stuffed here and there or dropped wholesale down into the foundation materials themselves, we can never be sure. For Freud, piety will have been an interpretive epoch constituted by not attending to mute signs, not wanting to learn too much, not wanting to acknowledge the swerve of unintended signs and the transformatively revelatory pressure of singular repetitions.
FOR A NEW MATERIALISM AGAINST RELIGION’S CULTURED DESPISERS
Above all, I have tried to make clear how, in cases like these, it does not do us any favors these days to remain true to a demythologizing political and social critique of religion as ideology so long as this gesture obfuscates structural similarities between ourselves and the religionists. Nor is it useful to take up the mantle of the atheist who steps outside religion if that mantle is woven with the same threads or shares the same hues, cost, and function of precisely the “religion” it is said not to be. As I have argued, it is my contention that it is a new materialism, specifically, that must necessarily challenge the tried and true game of agonistic mimickry, competitive “outbidding,” all variations of the old master-slave dialectic which—we should know by now—does not promise winners so much as a common exposure to death. Most importantly of all, however, a new materialism which remains indifferent to earlier tactics of Enlightenment does so as, precisely, an act of fidelity to what Gilles Deleuze called a plane of immanence or the peculiarly groundless ground of all efforts to think phenomenological immanence. In fact, we need to go a step further in order to be more precise than general talk of ignoring the distinction between the inside/outside of “religion” and in my case we can do so by saying that one exemplary figure in particular has returned with remarkable forcefulness, as if summoned back from the dead by, precisely, unflinching efforts to move forward with a philosophy oriented around both difference or multiplicity and immanence.
COMING INSURRECTIONS
I have tried to explore a few of these Paulinisms which are, precisely, subtracted from the architectonics of Christianity (where Paul becomes—suspiciously and in a self-congratulatory way—an “early” or “original” version of an imagined global triumph), but also subtracted from typical philosophemes in the sense that the apostle becomes a bearer of that “underground current” of a “materialism” in which accident and the encounter with (or folding of) an outside spur a thought of new kinds of solidarity. Without being underwritten by a triumphalistic grand narrative, without the guarantee of philosophies of representational mimicry or transparent consciousness, my Paul becomes in this context—in a more Deleuzean vein—an assemblage of affects without stable sensibility, unregistered and only misleadingly representable effects of forces that came and went, which were corralled into Roman families and gendered hierarchies (again, on the one hand) and a refusal of the sexual body (on the other). For us, Paul is not the founder of Christendom but a site in which are registered affects lost in time and disconnected from the body.
In advocating a Deleuzean nominalism toward these massive entities (religion, the secular), I of course did not intend to make it any easier to place a biblical figure like the apostle Paul in relation to that equally massive (and intimately related) archive that is “the West.” On the contrary, to refuse the rules of this fundamental game is to liberate rogue elements of thinking that should begin to plague this tradition in new ways. That is, I have been arguing, the case in thinking about the legacy of Foucault in relation to the figure of Paul. In this respect, note that Alberto Toscano, in his important book on the category of the fanatic, criticizes the theological genealogy of Western political economy to be found in Agamben’s Kingdom and the Glory. Toscano claims that there is a profound problem with Agamben’s substantializing narrative of two millennia of history in which a contemporary society of the spectacle, for example, becomes a latter-day indication of a spectacular (and disempowering) theology of humanity as God’s image and the economy as the organized, managed, and organized machinations of the divine sovereign:
In doing so, Toscano claims, Agamben “decodes a hidden theological machine behind the operations of the secular world” in a way that betrays Foucault’s commitment to Nietzschean genealogy in which “‘the secret is that things have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms.’”4 But what if a nominalist interest in the primacy of the contingent organizing apparatuses of capture over their substantial self-same did not preclude comparative games of explication, as that engaged in by Agamben, but rather proliferated them beyond (all) measure? This, essentially, is my gamble, and no straightforward gesture to the stability of “the secular” could safely discredit it. It is within this game of an open-ended archive, a West without grounding coordinates in names like theology, religion, or the political, that I think a reading of Paul becomes all the more compelling, if all the more dangerous as well. As Clayton Crockett sometimes reminds us, it was Deleuze who said that it is a conceptual commitment to the death of God that yields a world in which
everything can become a theologeme.
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