CONCLUSION
New Beginnings
The text, however, as we find it today tells us enough about its own history [seine eigenen Schicksale]. Two distinct forces, diametrically opposed to each other, have left their traces [ihre Spuren] on it. On the one hand, certain transformations got to work on it, falsifying the text in accord with secret tendencies [geheimen Absichten], maintaining and extending it until it was turned into its opposite. On the other hand, an indulgent piety reigned over it [eine schonungsvolle Pietät über ihm gewaltet], anxious to keep everything as it stood, indifferent to whether the details fitted together or nullified one another. Thus almost everywhere there can be found striking omissions [auffällige Lücken], disturbing repetitions [störende Wiederholungen], palpable contradictions [greifbare Widersprüche], signs of things the communication of which was never intended [Anzeichen, die uns Dinge verraten, deren Mitteilung nicht beabsichtigt war]. The distortion [der Entstellung] of a text is not unlike a murder. The difficulty lies not in the execution of the deed but in the doing away with the traces [ihre Spuren].
—Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (trans. Katherine Jones)
It is confirmed likewise by Caius, a member of the church, who arose under Zephyrinus, bishop of Rome. He, in a published disputation with Proclus, the leader of the Phrygian heresy, speaks as follows concerning the places where the sacred corpses (τ εϱ σκηνώματα) of the aforesaid apostles are laid: But I can show you the trophies of the apostles (τ τϱóπαια τν ποστóλων). For if you will go to the Vatican or to the Ostian Way, you will find the trophies of those who laid the foundations of this church (εϱήσεις τ τϱόπαια τν ταύτην δϱʊσαμένων τν κκλησίαν).
—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].”
Indeed.
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.
A more radical stance must be taken, however, and we take it when we read in order to turn the corner with Paul, steering him, his texts, and his little chariot of Western foundationalism around the corner in an arena of immanence from which none of us will escape, but in which we may yet find surprises and which we may yet transform. One should be brutal about the issue. Does not the difference in these two interpretive approaches not itself constitute the difference between, on the one hand, a mere idealistic declaration of a “step outside” the Paulinist narrativities and Platonist metaphysics of the West and, on the other, an actual transformation of the very framework of this metaphysics itself? Convinced that this is the case, I was also persuaded that Nietzsche, Freud, Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze have done us no favors in their failing to confront the issue head on. We must now more patiently engage in a shrewd genealogical Verwindung of a hegemonic Pauline narrative which in important respects continues to plague recent “radical” readers of Paul, from Stanislas Breton and Alain Badiou to Daniel Boyarin. Forget Nietzsche’s mere disavowals of Paul and the foundationalist metaphysics of the West: we must rework the cultural function of the apostle, as if to allow another gospel to ring out from him, as if to witness to another type of collectivity or other solidarities confronting other political catastrophes, all these forming alongside a repetition of this name now within the path of an “underground current” of a new materialism. In an axiom I have tried to clarify in the different sections of this book, what we need is a rethought political or social canon of Western “origins,” one in which we find in Paul a “materialism for the masses,” an origin itself split into a multiplicity, constituted by difference, and therefore the farthest thing from a foundational idealism.
Like Freud’s project to intervene in always singularly interwoven threads of politics, history, and religion around the names of Moses and the West, this book takes seriously the idea that, for an essential founding patriarch of Christianity as well, the beatified imago of the original founder is already an effect of a violent imposition that consolidates profound cultural power—and indeed an implicit model of political identity—by being repeated unremarked. Alongside Freud’s dreamwork and textual excavation on Western cultural memory, therefore, here I have presented readers with tales of a very recent discovery of Paul’s concrete shoes. The revelation is disconcerting, awful even—an apostolic body turning up now with concrete shoes—and all the stranger as this surprising turn of events is only made possible by a series of technical developments within apparently disconnected forensic and archaeological spheres, above all recent work in continental philosophy and biblical studies.2 Nonetheless, what has been unearthed is as solid and real as can be, and there he is, not just any old cat in some squishy bag all putrescent down by the river’s edge. No, we have here a founding apostle—some will call him the inventor of Christianity—and there he is (it’s as clear as day), a sacred corpse all fitted up with concrete slippers. My work simply brings to light what has been obvious all along about this apostle, almost from the beginning no more than just bones and quick drying cement. If you don’t believe it, just call Eusebius.
As we see in Paul’s last extant writing, at the end of Romans (15:30–32)—as it were the final words of Paul—he seemed to recognize that he was destined to wear shoes of the cement variety, and he begged others to help him prolong his life amidst their looming threat. To be subtracted from your own legacy, hidden inside its veneer in fact, is no joke. Freud was not wrong to have suspicions that it is hero worship itself—all those paens to the founding father—in which we see the contortions of a cover-up. In this respect the figure of Paul—whom even Freud continued to read as the purveyor of promises of a Platonistically styled econonomic transaction guaranteeing salvation (those “foundation stones of a new religion founded by Paul”)—is even clearer than Moses. Even more, in a peculiar turn of events in keeping with Freud’s sense of repetition of drama in multiple spheres, as many alleged corpses of Paul as can now be unearthed all turn up as if carefully fitted with the same type of concrete shoe. Nietzsche named both the mass-produced similarity of these simulacra, and their similar types of concrete shoes, a phenomenon of a pop metaphysic whereby the real issue of worldly life was imagined to be siphoned off and securely guarded in another sphere altogether. This “massive phenomenon” of life as an organized savings plan was Nietzsche’s higher swindle, a popularized metaphysic that spreads around when we let bankers become the preachers of a world they’d like to run. Linking the story backward to Plato and forward to the internally regulated self-effacements of modern Europe, Nietzsche of course named the entire complex a Platonism for the masses, imagining Paul as its great evangelist. Remaining within the orbit of Nietzsche’s analysis, Freud diagnoses the psychic economy of this cultural mode as a form of idealist misidentification—in short, a volatile narcissism constituted by imagined participationist holisms.
At which point perhaps we sleuths really need to call in other agencies, as the scope of the crime scene we have stumbled upon starts to balloon into a conspiracy on the grandest of scales. Good detectives, we should note for the record that when these varieties of a Pauline corpse must have been exhumed so as thus to be retrofitted with the same type of concrete accoutrement can only occasionally be determined. What we can say is that the corpses in question seem to have been exhumed and laid back to rest—heavier each time—with some regularity. All we can say is that it is as if someone had a lot invested in making sure this particular type of body would never come floating to the surface. As one says, all hardboiled by the edge of a river, this body is not just any old cat in any old bag. But who would go to this trouble, why, and how, this mad quest to exhume and retrofit Paul and those who look like him with the proverbial concrete shoes? Who indeed would be so hell-bent on making sure that this type of corpse remains, back there, at the beginning, sunken down to where all good founders should stay, buried away with the foundations? Why, at any rate, would we participate in this crime, this madness?
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.
Now as much as ever, there is a remarkable array of political and intellectual issues being organized in and through the name of Paul, sometimes, in good Pauline fashion, by the force of surprising talk, awkward promises, and temporary cohabitations of a life-changing sort. The array of issues in play in these movements are all too important to ignore. Consider Freud’s lines reproduced earlier. Perhaps it is the New Testament, that always already operationalized covenant or charter of a religion that often stands in as “the West”—both in this West’s religiosity and in its secularity—which has always had altogether too many junior sleuths and all too few Detective Dupins of the sort Freud seems to describe. The psychoanalytic interpreter of found and founding contracts is clear enough. The excess of sleuths and paucity of detectives appear in and as a community of interpreters who tacitly agree not to attend to communications of that which was never intended. They are a collective of subjects anxious about what must not be seen and therefore a community haunted by sign-objects which squirm rather precariously at the edges of the community of meaning as that which must be refused entry as so many illegitimate emissaries from an unthinkably unintended communication. No wonder Freud links unintended communications to suspicions of a corpse ineffectively disposed of.
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
As the one stuck with this case, my promissory overview for my readers was simple: if you stay with me at the crime scene in order to photograph, to size up, and to chisel away at these concrete shoes, the resolution will be dramatic. I never forgot the traits of a recent film trailer. Once the shoes come off, once a body can float back to the surface, you will be returned, fully satisfied and a little wiser, to the title of the show. And is not the body floating to the surface the emergence of a new Paul indistinguishable from a new materialism? For my money, such a denouement would be worth the emergency lights, chilly air, and yellow tape at the crime scene of a significant textual murder, all those strong indications that the shoes on the corpse in front of us might herald striking inversions or shake-ups of reigning social hierarchies and the ready-made identities which take shelter therein to imagine themselves either inside or outside “religion.”
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
Paul is significant in my philosophico-political genealogy of the accident and the encounter which spurs thought because he has become a discursive lynchpin in the self-description of “the West” which can now subtract itself in relation to this structure in two catastrophic ways. In both cases the catastrophe occurs by including and acknowledging that which I have been arguing has only been included out, actively forgotten, strategically included as something so as to suppress some other intolerable something. As the economic, military, colonial histories of the West continue to play themselves out, I find we can include Paul in this way as that type, that uncanniest of guests, who knows about us things we tend actively not to know about ourselves. On the one hand, I have argued that we can subtract the lynchpin, the origin, the founding father from a story of Western religion as Christianity by pointing out that Paulinism was ultimately shortlived, ephemeral, an explosion of impossible rhetoric about the transformation of embodied and engendered habituations for the creation of the new. Within a generation the rhetoric had worn thin, the habituations or lived embodiments of received power relations demanded that the church—to survive in this world—would actively sacrifice the apostle to received models of community (on the one hand) or adopt a suicidal refusal of the same (on the other). As a genealogical moment, therefore, Paulinism is peculiarly worth thinking about. Somewhere between a repetition of the same and a refusal of this same repetition by way of a suicidal gesture is Paulinism: ephemeral, strange, a moment of suspension and tensing that expressed itself in a language of time and hilarious, mad, and maddening inversions of value. To meditate on such moments is to expose ourselves to them.
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.
Throughout, I have argued that we should maintain a kind of Deleuzean disinterest in that great machine of judgment which is the distinction between religion and the secular. This great machine and the sacrificial judgment it always and already extricates, veils a multiplicity of sites of social invention and political creation that rather should remain available, free, unowned, virtual exemplars we might affirm, repeat, or name differently. I even added that this Deleuzean indifference toward the prefabricated difference of this particular apparatus of judgment might be read as a latter-day repetition of Paul’s reckless appropriation of the Hellenistic philosopher’s paradoxical boast (that the poor sage owns all things) for the common life of his communities: “all things belong to you” (1 Corinthians 3:21ff.).
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:
Where Foucault had located, beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, the emergence of “governmental reason” in the early discourse of political economy and the concurrent practice of administering the health and productivity of populations, Agamben turns the clock back two millennia: to the writings of Aristotle and Xenophon on the economy, then to the fate of this notion within the theology of the Church fathers, beginning with Paul. In the process, he abandons Foucault’s commitment to discontinuity, as well as his related nominalist disdain for the assumption that substances, essences or universals can be registered across different historical domains.3
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.5