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

2. By the same token, while there is now an extraordinarily important cottage industry within historical studies about the Jewish Jesus or the Jewish Paul, it is almost never recognized within these studies that a historical tradition of narration (Paul as first Christian, origin of Christianity) and a tradition of metaphysics (identity as grounded or originated in the self-same) were profoundly intertwined. Nietzsche was right: Christian narrations of Christian origins were a popularization of Platonism. The reason the “Jewish Paul” stories have failed to be as important a cultural force as they might be is because historians wanted the one cog in the massive apparatus of this pop Platonism to be overcome (in the form of relinquishing its passé supersessionist Christian origins stories), even while they almost completely ignore the matching metaphysical mechanism, the very question of identity and groundedness. What I have here called a more thorough revolution of thinking will only be possible if we put a wrench simultaneously in both sets of interlocking gears, so to speak, and to do this we need to stop leaning on identity politics. As should be very clear already, the question of Judaism is essential to a transformation of this cultural machinery, which is why we cannot efface the important issues by collapsing everything back into an ultimately quietistic identity politics. I say more about the theme and some of the important historians in this tradition in my introduction, “Paul and the Philosophers: Return to a New Archive,” in Ward Blanton and Hent de Vries, eds., Paul and the Philosophers (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013).

3. With problem and apparatus I begin to flag an issue of a repetition which is itself a singularity, an issue of a philosophy of difference that will be central to the chapters to come. For the moment, for those interested, see, e.g., Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (London: Continuum, 1997), p. 198, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 399; cf. Foucault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 76ff. See also “What Is an Apparatus?” and Other Essays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).

4. Cf. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, The Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). Gumbrecht’s anecdotal labor in “Materialities/The Nonhermeneutic/Presence” (pp. 1–20) always meant a lot to me, as some of my earlier work (e.g., Displacing Christian Origins) had emerged during a period when Gumbrecht’s Materialities of Communication (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994) project were for me a very fresh approach to the humanities, not to mention my much appreciated introduction to the work of Niklas Luhmann and Friedrich Kittler. Note the respective concluding chapters in Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone, 1992), and Holy Feast and Holy Fast: the Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); see also Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011). I think one can say the same thing of her more recent work on blood, inasmuch as the auratic evocation of “living blood” is a mode of hierarchizing and liturgically enacting the issue of “lineage.” In other words, the materiality of such an investigation is, as in Gumbrecht, not in any reduction of the conceptual drama of “religion” or symbolic structures but rather in its mode of linking auratic, excessive attachment to historical and empirical “bearers” of such events of signification. Cf. Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Jonathan Goldberg, The Seeds of Things: Theorizing Sexuality and Materiality in Renaissance Representations (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009).

5. While others could be mentioned as well, note the important appropriation of Deleuzeanism for a new materialist spirituality which becomes indistinguishable both from a “resurrected” Paulinism and a new political ecology in Clayton Crockett and Jeffrey W. Robbins, Religion, Politics, and the Earth: The New Materialism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Clayton Crockett’s essay on the Pauline/Deleuzean event in Blanton and de Vries, Paul and the Philosophers; Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), pp. 157–169, Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), and Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life (New York: Polity, 2011), pp. 59–80; Santner, The Royal Remains, pp. xxi, 129–141. Bradley carries through some of his remarkable work on originary technicity by way of the “theologico-political” in Arthur Bradley, Unbearable Life: Essays on Biopolitical Theology (London: Routledge, 2014).

6. Cf. Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011); Eric Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), The Royal Remains; Esposito. Bios.

7. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 7.

9. Agamben, The Time That Remains (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 138–145.

10. Again, as was the case with regard to apparatus and problēmata in note 3, the “signature” indicates a kind of phenomenal event which itself precedes and constitutes our usual thinking about discretely separable subjects and objects or events separated in time. (In addition to note 3 in this chapter, see also the excellent work of Eric Alliez, The Signature of the World: What Is Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy? (London: Continuum, 2005). “In practice, the question is that of a theory of thought capable of diagnosing in our becomings the ontological condition for the real experience of thought” (ibid., 2). Pushing the same genealogical method also back to a Foucault who remained in this respect very close to Deleuze, Agamben engages the issues in Giorgio Agamben, Signature of All Things (Boston: MIT Press, 2009).

11. There are many touchstones evoked here, from Hegel’s kenotic creator to Heidegger’s subversive craftsman tinkering away at his “jugs.” More recently, Peter Sloterdijk brilliantly sets the old metaphysical traditions loose in search of a new form of therapy of the soul in Spheres, vol. 1: Bubbles: Microspherology, trans. Wieland Hoban (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011), cf. pp. 29ff.

12. It may be that at some point we would all diverge in our respective hopes in the question of identity and multiplicity or the promise of representational notions of democracy, but there is an important articulation of these types of “repetition problems” in a related critique of dominant forms of reading Paul in Denise Buell and Melanie-Johnson Debauffre, “Beyond the Heroic Paul: Toward a Feminist and Decolonizing Approach to the Letters of Paul,” in Christopher Stanley, ed., The Colonized Apostle: Paul Through Postcolonial Eyes (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2011), pp. 161–174.

13. See, for example, my chapter “Reason’s Apocalypse: Albert Schweitzer’s ‘Fully Eschatological’ Jesus and the Collapse of Metaphysics,” in Ward Blanton, Displacing Christian Origins: Philosophy, Secularity, and the New Testament (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

14. She will perhaps see herself in paragraphs like this one, chips which have fallen as we worked close by (with a tip of the hat to Max Müller) in the same Scottish woodshop. Thanks here to Yvonne Sherwood for many conversations on many planes to many conferences about Derrida, the self-described “last and the least” of the Jews.

15. Note the perfectly phrased opening gambit: “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.” Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (New York: Random House, 1996), p. 3.

16. Cf. Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The Six Killer Apps of Western Power (New York: Penguin, 2012).

17. For an important recent effort to rewire Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche—by way of Paul—see Didier Franck, Nietzsche and the Shadow of God, trans. Bettina Bergo and Philippe Farah (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012). Franck would disagree here with my articulation of the Romanitas and technicity of Nietzsche’s stance, but for the sake of his excellent and insightful book I could forgive him this oversight.

18. Goldberg, The Seeds of Things, p. 43. There is a great deal more to discuss in this excellent book, and I hope that my next book on Paul, spiritual exercises, and biopolitics will afford the space to do so.

19. Of course, the modes of this cohering of a new identity are already far afield from those surrounding the historical Paul. As Pervo summarizes nicely: “Paul is without doubt Luke’s hero, but Luke does not present the leading feature’s of Paul’s theology, nor does he reveal some of the more salient features of his biography. For the author of Acts, the heritage of gentile Christianity was under attack, and Paul could only be defended through some major modifications.” Richard Pervo, The Making of Paul: Constructions of the Apostle in Early Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010), p. 156. See Pervo’s book for a fuller discussion of some important distinctions between the Pauline letters and the Paul of Acts. For a similarly useful basic overview of generally accepted scholarly distinctions between Acts and the Pauline letters, see John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed, In Search of Paul: How Jesus’ Apostle Opposed Rome’s Empire with God’s Kingdom (San Francisco: Harper, 2004), pp. 27–41.

20. Before the quasi-transcendental apparatus and signature of Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, and Agamben, there was a vibrant buzz operating between cliché and archetype wthin the writings of McLuhan, a great thinker we should not forget, e.g., Marshall McLuhan, From Cliche to Archetype (Toronto: Gingko, 2011).

21. Essential for the breadth of its survey and its critical perspectives is an article by Todd Penner, “Madness in the Method? The Acts of the Apostles in Current Research,” Currents in Biblical Research 2, no. 2 (2004): 223–293. Among some excellent recent work on Acts, Penner’s work here and elsewhere (cf. In Praise of Christian Origins: Stephen and the Hellenists in Lukan Apologetic Historiography. (London: T&T Clark, 2004)) makes clear the many ways in which the text and diverse legacies of Acts could be reworked and rethought along genealogical lines, modes which would overflow the specific tale being spun here between Freud, Nietzsche, and Paul. Or, similarly rich and important, note the related work of Willi Braun, Ron Cameron, and Merrill P. Miller in their respective efforts to unearth modes of thinking earliest Christianities without collapsing these into hegemonic rhetorical and political narrative structures of Acts (e.g., Redescribing Christian Origins (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2004); It’s Just Another Story: The Politics of Remembering the Earliest Christians (London: Equinox, 2013)). In fact, a kind of classic which should be republished is Ron Cameron’s “Alternate Beginnings—Different Ends: Eusebius, Thomas, and the Construction of Christian Origins,” in Dieter Georgi, Lukas Bormann, Kelly del Tredici, and Angela Standhartinger, eds., Religious Propaganda and Missionary Competition in the New Testament World (Leiden: Brill, 1994), pp. 501–526. As I say, there is a great deal worth mentioning these days. I will point to some others further on, though it goes without saying that a full treatment of Acts in the constitution of Western cultural memory is another project in its own right. Here I am only sparking a few fires by situating Acts polemically between Roman suppression of first-century Jewish rebellion, Eusebius, and the hegemonic discourses of “Christian origins” which seem ubiquitous from the Evangelical churchman to the deconstructive cultural theorist.

22. And do we not here hit upon one further painful irony in the functioning of Christian origins stories? That is, it was only after a predominantly gentile Christianity began to press for a retroactive naturalization or self-protection of its own identity that there was invented the image of the monolithic, conservative, reactionary “Jew,” the very one who could not yet see his way to the cosmopolitan realities of diversity.

23. The title of one of his lectures on Pauline texts.

24. It is on the subject of ambivalence, for example, that a more elaborate genealogy of Acts within Western cultural memory should be taken up. One excellent starting point would be the work of Joseph B. Tyson, which (as historical reconstruction and also reception history) I admire a great deal. See Joseph B. Tyson, Luke, Judaism, and the Scholars: Critical Approaches to Luke-Acts (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999). Thanks to James Crossley for steering me toward Tyson’s study.

25. Christopher Mount, Pauline Christianity: Luke-Acts and the Legacy of Paul (Boston: Brill, 2002). See his discussion of Irenaeus as an indication of second-century developments in the reception history of both Acts and Pauline texts, with shifts in the reception of Acts increasingly determining the future of the Pauline texts (cf. 11–44).

27. You can see my interest in clichés becoming archetypes, in the sense that I am here primarily interested in the possible naturalization or retrojection of a Jewish/Christian distinction. This focus need neither ignore nor be obscured by the interest of Acts in both fetishizing the idea of a “true Israel” or of appending this appellation as a characteristic of that group whose other name will increasingly become Christian rather than Jew”

28. Indeed, the parallels between the Jerusalem elite of the Gospel of Luke and “the Jews” of Acts is an intriguing story in itself, part of the way the author of builds a system of echoes between the redemptive figures of Jesus and Paul. Both figures appear in four trial scenes, are exonerated by the Roman figures in the episode, and then punished because of the pressure of Jewish groups.

29. As Todd Klutz argues in an important reading of the exorcism stories in Luke-Acts, even the miracle tales were geared toward downplaying the tensions between Paul and his compatriot followers of Jesus in Jerusalem: “Due chiefly … to his need to highlight unity and harmony within the Jesus movement, Luke puts most of the blame for Paul’s difficulties on the shoulders of the outsiders; and consonant with this tendency, two of the themes summarised above serve primarily to define and underscore the boundaries between those inside and those outside.” Todd Klutz, The Exorcism Stories in Luke-Acts; a Sociostylistic Reading (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 242. Which is to say that the rhetorical and narratological management of an inside and outside remains, at every level of Luke-Acts, necessary.

30. Sanders’s work seems to me as crucial as ever, all the more important when we shift our focus from authorial origins and intentions toward the “apparatuses” or paradigms of interpretability as these begin to exert themselves through the earlier texts (which is to say once we move away from the origin of Acts toward Ignatius, Eusebius, Nietzsche and Freud). Jack T. Sanders, The Jews in Luke-Acts (London: SCM, 1987), pp. 11–13.

31. See Christina Petterson, Acts of Empire: The Acts of the Apostles and Imperial Ideology (Taiwan: CCLM, 2012), especially ch. 4, p. 96f.

32. This aspect of Acts is all the more interesting when imagined against the backdrop of a radical critique of Roman imperial authority, as the ambivalence (about the discursive role or value of Rome) highlights the way that it is in relation to Rome that Acts wants to constitute a distinction of identities (and political entities) between “Christians” and “Jews.” As I have suggested already, it is precisely in ambivalence that the essential collaborationist political moves are being made.

33. In this respect, for me C. Kavin Rowe’s World Upside Down: Reading Acts in the Graeco-Roman Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) misses aspects of its opportunity to participate in a promising reworking of inherited traditions of political theology by way of the text of Acts. On the one hand, as I have already mentioned, I agree that there are a number of open legacies to be reworked within Acts and its afterlives, and Rowe provides useful and creative readings of Acts’ Christianity as a challenge to political habits outside this group. Still, for me the book collapses a potentially radical hermeneutical tradition into a remarkably conservative interest in “narrative” (a code for something he imagines as a “foundation” and a “totality” which also functions as a “norm,” cf. 166). “Hermeneutics as politics” (to borrow from the work of Stanley Rosen) is thus transformed into a mere identity politics, replete with anxieties that a Christian commitment to truth is excluded by dominant forms of religious studies in North America. This overlooking of the radicality within the hermeneutical tradition is not unrelated to Rowe’s imagination of Carl Schmitt (or Giorgio Agamben) as foundational metaphysicians of the sort he himself wants to be (cf. pp. 110f., 169). The same could be said of Rowe’s reduction of the relevance of Jan Assmann for the study of Acts to Assmann’s interest in the political legacies of monotheism over against polytheism.

34. Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, “What I owe to the Ancients” in Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1990), p. 117.

35. For example, see discussions of objet petit a and transference through the notion of the agalma as this emerges in Lacan’s striking engagement with Plato’s Symposium. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book 8, Transference (unpublished translation by Cormac Gallagher from unedited French manuscripts).

36. See, for example, Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, trans. Dana Hollander (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), From Cult to Culture: Fragments Toward a Critique of Historical Reason (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), Occidental Eschatology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). The discovery, editing, and interpretation of Taubes’s fuller correspondence with Schmitt is a real breakthrough for understanding the larger stakes of Taubes’s interventions. See Thorsten Palzhoff and Martin Treml, eds., Jacob Taubes—Carl Schmitt: Briefwechsel (Munich: Fink, 2011). The English translation appears as To Carl Schmitt: Letters and Reflections (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). Note also the important collection of Randi Rashkover and Martin Kavka, eds., Judaism, Liberalism, and Political Theology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). Finally, I confess I cannot quite understand the Paulinist interventions of Taubes without seeing how they are inflected as fragments, visions, and fantasies in the novel of Susan Taubes, Divorcing (New York: Random House, 1969). That story I will hold for another occasion.

37. Cf. Shmuel Trigano, “‘The Jewish Question’ in the Return to Paul,” in Blanton and de Vries, Paul and the Philosophers. Trigano’s work is important—essential even—though I think he and many others quite wrongly assume there is anything representational about “the universal” in recent work of Badiou and Žižek, something both philosophers are (both often and consistently) at pains to refuse as a debilitating form of traditional metaphysics and dangerous politics.

38. I pick on Professor Trigano’s work here with admiration and in order to reflect myself on how his important criticisms and (theologico-)political concerns may function more forcefully in other contexts than his own. I hope to say more about his larger work in a different context. For now I note simply the updating and genealogical expansion of his earlier L’E(xc)lu in a reading of Romans as a paradigmatic moment in Western political economies in Shmuel Trigano, Democratic Ideal and Shoah: The Unthought in Political Modernity (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009), pp. 85ff. What I cannot accept are Trigano’s assertions—as if parroting a long history of Christian exceptionalism—that there is anything original, and therefore, non-Jewish, about Paul, the very assertions which ground Trigano’s reading of Romans.

39. Comedy, as a philosophical topic with profound implications for questions of a genealogy of “religion,” is a topic I will pursue more rigorously in the next book. Initial indications of these directions can be found in Ward Blanton and Yvonne Sherwood, “Shallow Graves: Toward a Philosophical Comedy of Tears Over the Serial Dying of Gods” in Derrida Today 6, no. 1 (2013): 78–96.

40. Again, the ambivalence involved here, with the author tipping his hat to the aggressivities of Rome even as he usually makes a narrative distinction between “Jews” and the followers of Jesus for the purposes of explaining violence, just makes the usual operation all the more striking (e.g., Luke 2:1, 3:1; Acts 17:7). That the author can also blame pagans for causing unrest which the Romans quell on behalf of the evident nonguilt of the Christians I find not to affect the effective force of the imaginary complicity between the followers of Jesus and Roman juridical authorities (cf. Acts 16, 19).

41. While a full discussion must wait another occasion, it is easy to see here how I read Schmitt’s central interlocutor, Erik Peterson. Against an effusive ecclesiastical appropriation of the work of Erik Peterson in recent decades, I see absolutely no reason to assume that there is anything certain about the suggestion that, with its development of a Trinitarian theology, Christianity effectively subtracted itself from all forms of political theology, as if the Trinitarian confusion of the one and the many happily withholds justificatory blessing from all efforts either to represent or directly to incarnate in worldly political forms the structures of divinity or being themselves. This kind of assertion seems to me simply the apologetic revery of a triumphalist Christianity. While I want to develop the story further on another occasion, for the moment I note simply the sheer tenacity and intensity of Peterson’s efforts to read Paul into his triumphalist story of a post-Jewish and postpagan postpolitics, a story always premised on the assumption that something about “Christianity” breaks decisively, and as an ideal entity, from its counterparts in “Judaism” or “paganism” (e.g., in his essay, “The Church from Jews and Gentiles,” in Theological Tractates (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), pp. 40–67. In terms of a genealogical intervention, then, I claim that Schmitt was in the right against Peterson, though Schmitt could not begin to see the ways in which, as Taubes began to imagine, there was in this material forgotten indications of a sovereign partisanship emerging “from below” rather than, always and already, from the side of institutional loci of power.

42. As we will see, one of the things I find most disappointing about Derrida’s encounter with Paul in Veils is the way he immediately equates Pauline discussions of veiling and insight with a flat-footed Platonism, which in turn he imagines to constitute the constitutive difference between Judaism and Christianity. Ouch. More interesting, freer from the inherited tale of “Christian origins,” would necessarily have been to wonder about the relationship between Paul’s apocalyptic polemic of the “veiling,” of his adversaries and of Moses himself in 2 Corinthians 3, with Paul’s situating of his own transformative news as a variation of a theme directly borrowed from the same Moses: “Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into heaven?’ (that is to bring Christ down) or ‘Who will descend into the abyss?’ (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead). But what does it say? ‘The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart’ (that is the word of faith that we proclaim)” (Romans 10:5–8).

The anti-Mosaic feel of the 2 Corinthians story is therefore only a repetition of what is more obvious at Romans 10. In both cases the partisan splits the inherited text into an imagined author and a peculiar splitting off (from the same text, from the same author) of rogue forms of agency (e.g., in Romans the difference between “what Moses writes” and what “the word of faith says”) which can actually turn against the imagined authorial persona itself. Derrida’s misreading is understandable, as it is how the early Christian apologies wanted to read Paul, and they effectively set the interpretive rules—constructed the concrete shoes—which transformed Paul the partisan into Paul the self-grounding original whole (or Platonism for the masses). But perhaps I have said enough to indicate that we need rather to think about Paul the reader of a rogue agency which will throughout have something important to do with clinamen and the Lacanian objet petit a, the little gap in agency which can threaten to burn up the very agency itself. These links we will develop in following chapters.

43. Like the 9/11 attack, perhaps (only time will tell), the effectively political symbolic force of the violence against Galilee, Judea, and the Temple around 70 C.E. remained an obsession to Jewish and non-Jewish writers for decades (cf. Josephus, 4 Ezra).

44. Cf. Josephus’s Jewish War 7.263–71 or Antiquities 4.176–95. For discussion, note Harold Attridge, The Interpretation of the Antiqutates Judaica of Flavius Josephus (Cambridge: Scholars, 1976), pp. 90ff. More recently, note the remarkable series of commentaries on Josephus’s writings, edited by Steve Mason, notably the discussion of colonial dynamics and adaptability in the excellent introduction to John Barclay’s Flavius Josephus: Against Apion (vol. 10 of Flavius Josephus: Translation and Commentary) (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp. 1–40.

45. That I say “potentially” under the same umbrella signals of course an important break of a philosophy of difference from all forms of representationalism. In the case of the former, the strange attachments and rogue passions constituting identity themselves “stick out” obtrusively as phenomena for analysis, and these attachments or passions always render merely representational or naturalizing tales a kind of second-order tabulation of a more originary event.

46. You can see the distinctions I am drawing between my own and Taubes’s project, my admiration for Taubes notwithstanding. In this case, pressing the relevant genealogical distinctions earlier in the history of Christianity is not a magic formulae, as if the original were more authentic. Nevertheless, my procedure insinuates much more clearly than Taubes, I think, the way the relevant schisms or fault lines within the genealogical drama are internally, intimately related. My main problem with Taubes is that even his story of Paul naturalizes too much of a tale we have been taught—carefully, strategically taught—to reify at every opportunity, namely, the distinction between Judaism and Christianity as oppositional identities within a totalized system of distinctions.

47. Cf. references to Plato and Moses respectively throughout Runia’s classic work to get a sense of the phantasmagoria which sometimes seem to dupe Philo himself. On this topic, note the excellent discussions in relevant sections of T. David Runia, On the Creation of the Cosmos According to Moses (Atlanta: Societyof Biblical Literature, 2005).

48. I do not know of a better discussion than the one developed by Troels Engberg-Pedersen’s groundbreaking work, Cosmology and Self in the Apostle Paul: The Material Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 8–48.

49. I have explored some of these in relation to being an academic biblical scholar in Ward Blanton, “Neither Secular Nor Religious: On Saving a Critic in Biblical Criticism,” in Roland Boer, ed., Secularism and Biblical Studies (London: Equinox, 2010), pp. 143–164.

50. Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 68, section 68.

1. Cf. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan VII: Transference, trans. Cormac Gallagher (New York: Karnac, 2002). While I think Foucault’s reading of Lacan as a return of Cartesian thought to “the oldest tradition, the oldest questioning, the oldest disquiet of the epimeleia heautou, which is the most general form of spirituality.” Michel Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–82 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 30. Fair enough, but that disquiet—which itself drives, lures, and impels the “practice on oneself” of philosophical life—is perhaps more directly approached by Lacanian topoi of a madness of desire than by terms like “practice.” On the other hand, assuming the two are intertwined, then what is the value of Foucault’s naming Heidegger or Lacan as the either/or of contemporary theorizing? Here I depart also from the very interesting discussion of Jean Allouch, La psychoanalyse: est-elle un exercice sprituel? Réponse à Michel Foucault (Paris: EPEL, 2007).

2. Michel Foucault articulates a standard opinion when he writes: For our purposes, note however, that in the 1960–61 seminar on transference, Lacan articulates love as the ‘being relation’ operative between lover and beloved with what one does not know (and yet knows). It is that which splits the singularity of such a relation from itself, that which indicates a certain topos of castration, and that which points toward an excess over the self-referential or homeostatic nature of identity.

3. I say early development in the sense that he developed these in two of the first books to appear in English (The Sublime Object of Ideology and For They Know Not What They Do). The category remains essential for him, however, and here I am quoting from Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), p. 310.

4. Jacques Derrida, “My Chances/Mes Chances: A Rendezvous with Some Epicurean Stereophanies,” in Psyche: Inventions of the Other (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 1:351.

5. Bruno Bosteels has an excellent discussion of the development of Althusser’s questions about structure and historical change, which are taken up and developed by students, including Alain Badiou. See Bosteel’s Badiou and Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), pp. 44–76.

6. Cf. Eric L. Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), and The Royal Remains: the People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). Santner’s work, a rethinking of categories of the messianic in relation to a kind of surplus immanence within immanence, is very important, and I will return to it.

7. Cf. Giorgio Agamben, “The Passion of Facticity,” in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 185–204.

8. Note that it is “facticity,” which is the Heideggerian philosophical topos, that finds its most immediate resonance within Pauline stories of a faithful waiting on the coming parousia of Jesus. This particular resonance is also what drives the early Heidegger to understand a historically authentic Paul in 2 Thessalonians as intentionally setting up a contradictory apparatus for predicting the approach of the parousia as well as a peculiar doubling of Christ and the so-called anti-Christ figure in that letter. The Christic doppelganger and the refusal of pseudepigraphic writing in Paul’s name are essential for Heidegger to bring out the hesitation and ambivalence constitutive of the singularity of facticity. See Ward Blanton, “Heidegger’s Light from the Ancient Near East,” chapter 3 in Displacing Christian Origins: Philosophy, Secularity, and the New Testament (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007): I also think it is imperative that we not miss the deep links between Heideggerian thrownness into facticity and the Lacanian emphasis on split subjectivity. The historical finitude of Heidegger and the structural splitting or finitude of Lacan cohere much better than Michel Foucault recognized when he makes this split the great either/or of his time. My juxtaposition of the two here is self-conscious, drawing out the similarity—for the comparison with Paul—of different ways to imagine what Adrian Johnston, speaking about Žižek, calls “a contingent yet a priori material foundation” of phenomena. Adrian Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press), p. 22. Here I just mention the issue (highlighted by the title of the book), declare my position on the matter, and point to Lacan’s allusion to Heidegger.

9. As they are also haunted by, I note, the sacrifice of Abraham. My work on the politico-theological “afterlives” of Paul and Abraham will appear elsewhere, a topic I have started to teach, lecture, and write about with Yvonne Sherwood. For the moment, I simply reference the important example of another haunting by Abraham in Paul Kahn, Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).

10. Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings 1978–1987 (London: Verso, 2006).

11. Remarkable references and engagements with the figure of Paul occur throughout Breton’s philosophical oeuvre, though, for sustained reflection, see Stanislas Breton, A Radical Philosophy of Saint Paul (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).

12. Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings 1978–1987 (London: Verso, 2006) p. 183.

13. One sees how my approach to the genealogy of these categories is so profoundly different from someone like Martin Hägglund, Quentin Meillassoux, or even some of the work of Alain Badiou, all of whose wonderful pleas for a new materialism in philosophy seem deeply marred to me by their docility in the face of received category distinctions between religion and its outside. I explained why I think we should develop a cultivated indifference to this distinction in Displacing Christian Origins and have summarized in a Deleuzean vein the basic genealogical and political thrust of what for me are the important issues in Ward Blanton, “Neither Secular Nor Religious: On Saving a Critical in Biblical Scholarship,” in Roland Boer, ed., Secularism and Biblical Studies (London: Equinox, 2010).

14. This line from one of Breton’s private letters now warehoused in his archive within the Catholic Institute of Paris, in this case p. 2 of entry 786.28.1.a. Althusser-Breton (5 p., i.e., 3 f.). The letter was later published as “Jésus et Lacan” in Psychanalystes: Revue du Collège de psychanalystes, no. 14 (1985): 75–82.

15. Ibid., pp. 4, 2.

16. For present purposes I follow the translation in Jacques Derrida, Psyche: Inventions of the Other, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007).

17. Clayton Crockett, Deleuze Beyond Badiou: Ontology, Multiplicity, and Event (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), p. 69.

18. To say the least, as historian of Paulinism and of his Greco-Roman philosophical contexts, such a wonder is not at all without interest for me! But it is not the issue I am pressing here. On that question of the ancient figure, one to pursue on another occasion, I will simply mention that the question of Paulinism and popularized Platonisms is far from simple, particularly in light of, precisely, the Stoic immanence evoked by the apostle at key points (e.g., 1 Corinthians 15:28; cf. Romans 11:36). As a placeholder for coming discussions, one should mention the stunning analysis, insights yet to be worked through in the guild of biblical scholarship, of the work of Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Cosmology and Self in the Apostle Paul: The Material Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), esp. pp. 8–38. I think Engberg-Pedersen’s reading of 1 Corinthians 15 as, precisely, a Stoic deconstruction of Platonic dualism, is correct.

19. My sense that Derrida here does not do enough to unseat the very terms of an imagined and inherited contest between the veils of the “Christian Paul” and synecdochic references to Judaism (via Levinas, talk of law, and the tallith) hangs on me when I read the otherwise very nice piece on Veils by Timothy K. Beal and Tod Linafelt, “To Love the Tallith More than God,” in Yvonne Sherwood and Kevin Hart, eds., Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 175–188. I should point out, though, that Beal and Linafelt are here intentionally playing close to the text of Derrida, so one would not necessarily expect them to contravene this aspect of the piece. Also engaging the same essay of Derrida, Pyper does speak more rigorously to unsettle the terms of debate whose operationality I am arguing Derrida does too little to unseat. Hugh S. Pyper, “Other Eyes: Reading and Not Reading the Hebrew Scriptures/Old Testament with a Little Help from Derrida and Cixous,” ibid., pp. 159–173. That it is precisely Paul here in Derrida who somehow escapes what might be the expected deconstruction or problematizing of the opposition between Judaism, Christianity, and Western philosophy I do not at all take to be a mere accident, a mere slip of the pen.

20. There is an excellent discussion of Serres’s engagement with the Epicurean clinamen in Hanjo Berressem, “‘Incerto Tempore Incertisque Locis’: The Logic of Clinamen and the Birth of Physics,” in Niran Abbas, ed., Mapping Michel Serres (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), pp. 51–71.

21. Hal Taussig, In the Beginning Was the Meal: Social Experimentation and Early Christian Identity (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009), p. 54. In citing this excellent book, here I drew attention to the reference to “Christian” communities only because in our case (unlike Taussig’s wide-ranging study of New Testament texts) we are focused on Paul, for whom I do not like to use the term.

22. In case I need to say it out loud, one sees here, too, my interest in “undying” life not as some category of a stable or ideal eternity but rather as a matter of properly Epicurean swerve, particularly an Epicurean swerve that takes some new twists in the presence of later figures like Althusser and Derrida. Put differently, undying life will be for me a matter of the archive of an “underground current of [repressed] materialism.”

23. Pliny, Letters and Panegyrics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), letter 10.

24. As for a comparison of Pauline communities and other forms of Greco-Roman associations, see, in addition to Taussig, the excellent recent work of Philip A. Harland, Associations, Synagogues, and Congregations: Claiming a Place in Ancient Mediterranean Society (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), Dynamics of Identity in the World of the Early Christians (London: T&T Clark, 2009); and, very differently focused, William S. Campbell, Paul and the Creation of Christian Identity (London: T&T Clark, 2008).

25. Karl Marx, “Difficulties Concerning the Identity of the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature,” part 1, section 3, subsection C in The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, Marx-Engels: Collected Works, vol. 1 (London: Blunden, 1902 [1841]).

26. Ibid., “The Declination of the Atom from the Straight Line,” part 2, ch. 1.

27. For two examples to swim up the “underground current” against the current, see Clarence E. Glad, Paul and Philodemus: Adaptability in Epicurean and Early Christian Psychagogy (New York: Brill, 1995); and—focused primarily on Renaissance depictions—Jonathan Goldberg, The Seeds of Things: Theorizing Sexuality and Materiality in Renaissance Representations (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009).

28. I am thinking of Heidegger’s fascinating reading of Pauline texts. See Martin Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2004). I discuss and criticize aspects of this work in my Displacing Christian Origins.

29. Michel Serres, The Birth of Physics (Manchester: Clinamen, 2001), p. 21.

30. This is perhaps the important point to make in relation to Schweitzer’s line about Nietzsche failing to become Saint Paul. It is not so much that the materialist failed to become like Paul. He will have become like him, one way or another.

31. Derrida, Psyche, 1:362.

32. Serres, The Birth of Physics, p. 42f.

34. Berressem, “‘Incerto Tempore Incertisque Locis,’” pp. 51–71.

35. Michel Serres, Angels: A Modern Myth (Paris: Flammarion, 1995), p. 33.

1. Stanislas Breton, The Word and the Cross (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), p. 55. As should be clear by now, I flag the word Christianity—understandable enough in Breton’s contexts within the Institut Catholique in Paris—for serious discussions of Paul, as it was a term Paul did not use. Nor is it a term he would have used if it were thought to imply the invention of a new religion. For a lengthier discussion of a reading of Paul as a partisan among a multiplicity of early Jewish trajectories, see my introduction to Ward Blanton and Hent de Vries, eds., Paul and the Philosophers (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013).

2. Here I am thinking above all of the repeated self-definitions of Žižek and Badiou. As for secondary literature discussing the common self-designations, my favourites are Adrian Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2008); and Bruno Bosteels, Badiou and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). Useful short interviews with Badiou and Žižek can be found in an importantly related collection of Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, eds., The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism (New York: re.press, 2010).

3. Two very important ideology critiques of modern biblical studies should be mentioned straightaway, Dale Martin’s “Paul and the Judaism/Hellenism Divide: Toward a Social History of the Question,” in Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Paul Beyond the Judaism/Hellenism Divide (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2001), pp. 29–61; and Halvor Moxnes’s Jesus and the Rise of Nationalism: A New Quest for the Nineteenth-Century Historical Jesus (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010). Susannah Heschel has done the most important archival work about the central function of anti-Semitism within modern biblical studies; see Susannah Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), and The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). See also William Arnal, The Symbolic Jesus: Historical Scholarship, Judaism and the Construction of Contemporary Identity (London: Equinox, 2005); James Crossley, Jesus in an Age of Terror: Scholarly Projects for a New American Century (London: Equinox, 2008); Shawn Kelley, Racializing Jesus: Ideology and the Formation of Modern Biblical Scholarship (London: Routledge, 2002). The peculiarly disciplined work of thinking through the implications of such studies in ways that articulate themselves in new historiographic models for the historical Paul are only beginning to emerge really, in part because initial efforts to bracket discrete exegetical elements (as implicit anti-Semitisms, vestiges of crass valorizations of Protestantism over Catholicism or Judaism, etc.) in our reading of Paul do not yet go far enough in articulating what a more carefully interpreted Paul was doing (if not, say, criticizing “Jewish legalism,” exploring new and noninstrumental existential modes for religion, and so on). Several important steps in the right direction should be noted, however. See Stanley K. Stowers, A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews, and Gentiles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); Neil Elliott, The Arrogance of Nations: Reading Romans in the Shadow of Empire (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008); Briggitte Kahl, Galatians Re-imagined: Reading with the Eyes of the Vanquished (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010); and, more popularly, Pamela Eisenbaum, Paul Was Not a Christian: The Original Message of a Misunderstood Apostle (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2009).

4. See, for example, the discussion in Jean-Michel Rey’s excellent little book, Paul ou les ambiguités (penser/rèver) (Paris: Olivier, 2008), pp. 151–165. I am indebted to Sophie Fuggle for pointing out this book to me.

5. For those who are not familiar with contemporary historical research on Paul, it may be useful to recommend three books that I find to be some of the most important touchstones for an historical understanding of the figure. For specific readings of Pauline texts, I find unsurpassed the work of Dale B. Martin, The Corinthian Body (New Haven: Yale University Press); and Stanley Stowers, Rereading Romans (New Haven: Yale University Press). For more general and introductory comments, I recommend E. P. Sanders, Paul: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); and David Horrell, An Introduction to the Study of Paul (New York: Continuum, 2000).

6. The distinction between authentic and inauthentic letters of Paul has been a set piece of university discourse about this literature for more than a century in fact. For general discussion, see the introductions of Sanders or Horrell. For a more general historical framework explaining the appearance of pseudepigraphic productions in the Pauline tradition, see the reconstruction of John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan Reed, In Search of Paul: How Jesus’s Apostle Opposed Rome’s Empire with God’s Kingdom (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004).

7. Stanislas Breton, A Radical Philosophy of Saint Paul (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), p. 58.

9. While the inflection in this quotation is Deleuzean, it is important here that Žižek compares the operation of the quasi-cause to that of the objet petit a in the work of Lacan. I will return to some of these intertwined themes as a kind of pressure on the “return” of Paul in the discussion of Pasolini. Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (New York: Verso, 2012), p. 855.

11. Breton, A Radical Philosophy of Saint Paul, p. 60.

12. See the interview “Philosophy and Marxism,” in Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–87 (New York: Verso, 2006), p. 281.

13. Paul Ricouer, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).

15. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and the State,” in On Ideology (London: Verso, 2008), p. 46.

16. Étienne Balibar, “The Non-Contemporaneity of Althusser,” in E. Ann Kaplan and Michael Sprinkler, eds., The Althusserian Legacy (New York: Verso, 1993), pp. 1–16 (cited p. 14).

17. Genealogically speaking I feel a great deal of affinity here with Montag’s very interesting recent discussions (to my knowledge unpublished except in Spanish) of Spinozistic immanence as a repetition of an Epicurean materialism in “Lucretius Hebraizant: Spinoza’s Reading of Ecclesiastes”; cf. “Lucretius Hebraizant: La lectura de Spinoza del Eclesiastés,” in Montserrat Galcerán Huguet and Mario Espinoza Pino, eds., Spinoza contemporaneo (Madrid: Tierradenadie, 2009). See also Warren Montag, “Spinoza and Althusser Against Hermeneutics: Interpretation or Intervention?” in E. Ann Kaplan and Michael Sprinkler, eds., The Althusserian Legacy (New York: Verso, 1993), pp. 51–58.

18. Warren Montag, “Lucretius Hebraizant: Spinoza’s Reading of Ecclesiastes,” European Journal of Philosophy 20, no. 1, (March 2012): 109–129.

19. Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–87 (New York: Verso, 2006), p. 174. I have developed some of the links between secular immanence and the “return” of religion as an analytic form and critical archive in Ward Blanton, “‘Reappearance of Paul, “Sick”’: Foucault’s Biopolitics and the Political Significance of Pasolini’s Apostle,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, 10, no. 2 (2010): 52–77.

20. Althusser, “Ideology and the State,” p. 45f.

21. Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala, Hermeneutic Communism from Heidegger to Marx (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), p. 20. I do not mean to minimize here the importantly divergent negotiations of the question of an inaugural “event” of disclosure in Heidegger, Althusser, Vattimo/Zabala, or a reader of Althusser like Alain Badiou, though a full discussion of the event (perhaps paired with Bultmann) will wait for another time. I do want to note only that what several years ago seemed certain, a distinction between Badiou, Žižek, and the more Heideggerian version of “weak thought,” seems less so today.

22. Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), p. 1.

23. Eric Santner, The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 39.

25. Above all, I would, in this context, like to refer to the relationship between older discussions of a factical horizon and the steering of this phenomenological tradition toward a focus on specific techniques and technologies of self-making, the specificity of which I find to be a good way of interacting with the focus of Santner. Cf. Giorgio Agamben, What Is an Apparatus? (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). Incidentally, I find that, from start to finish, the question of this specificity of technique is a much better way to engage the peculiar aura that attached to the Pauline movement than more wholistic modes of thinking about a new covenant, new religion, new organizational mode. The surplus of immanence within immanence emerges from quirks in our practices of the everyday, the body’s (un)rootedness in the symbolic identities on offer, and it will ultimately be important to engage this issue with more patient readings of the believing body in Pauline texts than have emerged to this point. Santner’s statement is no less true for the ancient contexts than the medieval and modern ones: “what is missed in … all efforts to deflate the force of political metaphors by ‘deconstructing’ their metaphoricity, their status as fictions or rhetorical figures, is the difference between symbolic fiction and fantasy. What is missed is precisely the fact that such fictions get a grip on the imagination of individuals and collectives because they are ultimately sustained by the ‘real stuff’ of fantasy, by the dimension I have been calling the flesh” (Santner, The Royal Remains, p. 42f.). Put differently for the sake of the Pauline conversations, this implies that all readings of the ancient collective imaginaries which are premissed entirely on epochal, economic, or forensic distinctions between a “Jewish” and “Christian” mode of thinking about law, patrimony, etc., necessarily obscure important aspects of the mechanics of finding oneself, in the Pauline language, in Christ, crucified as Christ, etc.

26. There is a great deal to say about the excellent work of Fenves, and I hope to have time and space to do so more seriously in relation to the Paulinisms of the early Heidegger in the next volume. See Peter Fenves, The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011).

27. Apologies to Rosemary Radford Ruether for playing on the title of her classic, Sexism and God-Talk.

28. Stanislas Breton, La Pensée du Rien (Kampen: Kok Pharos, 1992), p. 113.

29. Stanislas Breton, Théorie des Idéologies (Paris: Desclée, 1976), p. 34.

31. The neuter (see below) is a common motif within Breton’s ontological writings throughout his career, indicating (among other things) his interest in neo-Platonism, set theory, and univocal ontologies like that of Duns Scotus. While it is not the time to explore the striking theologico-political genealogy signaled by this interest, it is worth pointing out that Breton’s work in this respect stands in stark contrast to recent anxieties about univocity and its ambiguity of the neutral space of being (or even disavowals of it, theological circumscriptions of the neutral as a taboo association) in the political theologies of the Radical Orthodoxy movement and others. For this anxiety, see, among other places, Conor Cunningham, Genealogy of Nihilism (London: Routledge, 2002); John Milbank, “The Thomistic Telescope: Truth and Identity,” in Conor Cunningham and Peter Chandler Jr., Transcendence and Phenomenology (London: SCM, 2008); cf. the discussion in Nicholas Wolterstorff, Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), pp. 24ff., especially the chapter about conflicting genealogies of rights.

32. See the transcript of the “Alterities” conference in 1986 during which Breton tried to articulate his own more and less metaphysical modes of thinking difference and alterity alongside those of Pierre-Jean Labarrière and Jacques Derrida et al., “Difference, Relation, Alterity,” trans. Pierre Colin, Parallax 10, no. 4 (2004): 42–60, p. 43.

33. Breton, Théorie des Idéologies, p. 35f.

36. Ibid., p. 118; cf. Breton, Théorie des Idéologies, p. 35.

37. Much more could be said about these issues in relation to Breton’s work, though such discussions would exceed the scope and interests of an introduction. But the rejection of the nothing as a substratum or outside of ideology are crucial and affect rather intimately the occasional critique of Breton as a Hegelian or neo-Platonic philosopher of identity. We should also not miss the way recent critiques of Gilles Deleuze, as neo-Platonic or Scotist thinker of the indifferent One, are answered in the same way: with a rejection of the substantiality or role as substratum of the void. See the excellent reflections on Deleuze and the future of emancipatory philosophy in Kenneth Surin, Freedom Not Yet: Liberation and the Next World Order (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), p. 238f. We should not miss that a similar concern not to reify the void as the substratum of the One is a driving concern behind Alain Badiou’s critique of Gilles Deleuze, which plays itself out also as the particular sort of Paulinism Badiou finds in the ancient apostle. Cf. Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), and Badiou’s (Paulinist) rejection of a “fourth” discourse of mysticism about the unspeakable One: “For Paul, the fourth discourse will remain a mute supplement, enclosing the Other’s share in the subject. He refuses to let addressed discourse, which is that of the declaration of faith, justify itself through an unaddressed discourse, whose substance consists in unutterable utterances…. I believe this to be an important indication, one that concerns every militant of a truth…. I shall call ‘obscurantist’ every discourse that presumes to legitimate itself on the basis of an unaddressed discourse.” Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 52.

38. In this sense, Breton’s discussions of the inconsistent and ontologically ephemeral (yet structurally profound) nature of the “empty part” or “zero” level of ideology are comparable to the later Lacanian discussions of the Real. Cf. Žižek’s discussion of the two roles of the “real” in Lacan’s early and later work, Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), pp. 161ff. Žižek’s own work, it may be added, has moved toward a more structurally/internally generated model of the real over time. See, e.g., Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Boston: MIT Press, 2006), pp. 25f.

39. Compare the majority of Agamben’s book on the remainder/remnant (which orients itself not so much on Romans as on 1 Corinthians 7 where the messianic pressuring of temporality forces an activity “as if” one were “not” what one is) to Rudolf Bultmann’s earlier (Heideggerian) fascination with the Pauline category, neither boredom nor anxiety exactly but functioning similarly at a quasi-ontological level. Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005); Compare the crescendo of Bultmann’s famous exposition of Paulinism in Rudolf Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament (New York: Scribner’s, 1951), 1:351f. As we seek to establish (generally missed) encounters between disciplines, interests, and temporalities, one should note also the emancipatory exploration of these categories in the work of Vincent Wimbush, Paul the Worldly Ascetic (New York: Mercer University Press, 1987).

40. Breton, Théorie des Idéologies, p. 47.

41. Ibid. While it would carry us too far afield to explore the link between the “materialism” of Althusser’s “aleatory encounter” and Breton’s “meontology,” suffice it to say that the crucial link is with the thought of contingency (the swerve or clinamen of “aleatory encounter”) and Breton’s thought of the “crucified” or brutally suppressed messianic function. Both alike provide a ground that disturbs the harmonious (but atomistic) fall of atoms in the void (for Althusser’s materialism) or the enjoyment of atomized worldhood and its “special kind of obviousness” in Breton.

43. Note the way that Althusser is at pains to include Heidegger in his repressed history of materialism, primarily because Althusser sees in Heidegger’s es gibt or il y a of the facticity of everyday life a profound statement about the originary contingency from which emerges this everyday. “A philosophy of the es gibt, of the “this is what is given,” makes short shrift of all the classic questions about the Origin, and so on. And it ‘opens up’ a prospect that restores a kind of transcendental contingency of the world, which in turn points to the opening up of Being, the original urge of Being, its ‘destining,’ beyond which there is nothing to seek or think. Thus the world is a ‘gift’ that we have been given, the ‘fact of the fact [fait de fait]’ that we have not chosen, and it ‘opens up’ before us in the facticity of its contingency, and even beyond this facticity, in what is not merely an observation, but a ‘being-in-the-world’ that commands all possible meaning.” Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–87 (New York: Verso, 2006), p. 170, cf. 190.

44. I am also echoing this particular language of Paul as an evocation of the language of the “neutral” in Roland Barthes, which also has strong echoes with Breton’s lifelong reflections on weakness and void as a paradoxical (and, as both would point out, scandalous) form of power. While the comparisons and the ongoing vivacity of their formulations are a topic for a different context, note the immanent antagonism implied in Barthes’s linguistic focus: “let’s recall that the subject of our course, the Neutral, is what baffles the paradigm: the paradigm is the law against which the Neutral rebels.” Roland Barthes, The Neutral: Lecture Course at the College de France (1977–1978) (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 42. In this respect, Breton shows us what Barthes never says clearly, that Paulinism constitutes a significant part of the archive of the rebellious neutral.

45. Stanislas Breton, The Word and the Cross, trans. Jacquelyn Porter (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), p. 54.

46. For the Spinozist-Althusserian critique of notions of individual freedom, see further on in this chapter. For the notion of Christianity as the spawn of, or tarrying with, a nightmare, see, among other places, Breton, The Word and the Cross, p. 71. Perhaps it is worth highlighting, in that respect, a fascinating—if often understated and underdeveloped—discourse of the “nocturnal” one finds in Breton’s writings, a discourse which insinuates itself into the present volume at multiple levels. While this is not the place to develop the ideas at any length, my suggestion is to consider Breton’s interest in neo-Platonic and Scotist univocity, on the one hand, and a Schellingian indeterminacy between God and Satan, on the other. Underneath and in excess of Apollonian representations and functional categories, there is a kind of “white noise” of univocity whose appearance sometimes threatens to undo all such roles.

47. See Stanislas Breton, Philosopher par passion et par raison (Grenoble: Jérome Million et les Auteurs, 1990), p. 8f.

While Sloterdijk does not generally remark on the profound links between Paulinism and precisely the break with religion imagined to mark the work of the young Heidegger, it is nevertheless the case that his own reflections on Heidegger in the aptly named Nicht Gerretet (Unsaved) constitute an important point of comparison for Breton’s reading of Paul. See Peter Sloterdijk, Nicht Gerretet: Versuche nach Heidegger (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001). My own analysis of the intimate union of, precisely, Heidegger’s effort to step outside of theology or religion and his own early turn toward Paulinism appears in a chapter entitled, “Paul’s Secretary: Heidegger’s Apostolic Light from the East” in Ward Blanton Displacing Christian Origins: Philosophy, Secularity, and the New Testament (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

48. Breton, Théorie des Idéologies, p. 93.

50. The play was the subject of a recent conference at the University of Glasgow, “Paul, Political Fidelity and the Philosophy of Alain Badiou: A Discussion of Incident at Antioch,” February 13–14, 2009. See Alain Badiou, The Incident at Antioch (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).

51. For an extended exploration of the motif, see Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), esp. pp. 12ff.

52. Breton, Philosopher par passion et par raison, p. 9. This is the kind of phrase which summarizes very nicely the ambiguously (post)metaphysical nature of Breton’s work. The movement of being is autotelic, returning to itself, but only inasmuch as it is producing a form of alterity and negation of identity. Breton was criticized by Derrida and others for phrasings that sound all too Hegelian, as perhaps does this one. Nevertheless, in keeping with what Derrida would himself say of Hegel (namely, that we would never be done reading and rereading him), Breton said fairly often that the best way to think the limits of metaphysics was by eschewing the illusion that one had stepped outside of them!

54. The association between appearance and messianic temporality in Benjamin is a common exploration. Note the Bergsonian link between ephemeral “image” and opening to radical revaluation in his famous “Concept of History” essay. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, 1938–1940 (Cambridge: Belknap, 2003), 4:390, 397.

55. Moreover, it is common within Breton’s writings to criticize the history of Christian theology which keeps Paulinist kenoticism or the Gothic inflation of the crucified safely distanced at the level of myth. Breton argues frequently that the subversive force of Paulinist cross-talk must be allowed to do its destructive and deflating labor within the ontological structures of Christian theology. Cf. Breton, The Word and the Cross, 95.

56. Jacob Taubes, From Cult to Culture: Fragments Toward a Critique of Historical Reason (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), pp. 5–6.

57. Breton, Théorie des Idéologies, p. 116.

58. Stanislas Breton, Philosophie Buissonniere (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1989), pp. 65–74.

61. Ibid., pp. 71, 74.

62. Cf. Breton, Philosopher par passion et par raison, p. 8.

63. One does not need to go far to discover a panoply of edifices, foundations, and richness of origin in relation to the Pauline legacy within the literature. For the moment I am sampling from some of the old standards: C. H. Dodd, Arthur Darby Nock, and Johannes Munck.

1. Boris Groys, The Communist Postscript, trans. Thomas H. Ford (New York: Verso, 2009), pp. 9ff.

2. Indeed, Groys’s criticisms of Foucault are oriented primarily around a desire to extend the folding, splitting, inverting paradoxes of the Foucauldian spiritual exercises, namely, by trying to formalize them in reason as such (which he does not think Foucault does); cf. p. 19f. In other words, despite their differences, under the banner of the spiritual exercise of “stuckness,” it seems appropriate to allow Groys and Foucault to stand side by side.

3. See Didier Franck, Nietzsche and the Shadow of God, trans. Bettina Bergo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012). I am very grateful to Bettina Bergo both for pointing me toward Franck’s work several years ago and also for showing me in advance pieces of her excellent English translation of this book.

4. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2006), p. 36.

5. Franco “Bifo” Berardi, The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009), p. 21.

6. Luther Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick Hutton, eds., Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1988), p. 25.

7. If the story begins for me with this project to suggest constellations for a rethinking of Paul which is simultaneously a rethinking of both “religion” and “philosophy,” then my next book about biopolitics, singularity, and Mediterranean life in the Roman Empire will tackle the topic from the ancient side of the comparative equation.

8. Halvor Moxnes makes the same point by declaring that Foucault “compares the moral philosophers of the early Roman empire of the first two centuries with Christian writers from the fourth and fifth centuries, not with their contemporaries in earliest Christianity.” Halvor Moxnes, “Asceticism and Christian Identity in Antiquity: A Dialogue with Foucault and Paul,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 26, no. 1 (2003): 3–29 (8).

9. As Hans Ruin glosses: “Christianity, in Nietzsche’s account, is simply the destruction of Rome and Athens by Jerusalem, contrived by Paul, as the foremost representative of priestly slave morality.” Hans Ruin, “Faith, Grace, and the Destruction of Tradition,” Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory 11, no. 1 (2010): 25. Ruin goes on to suggest some of the ways Foucault’s interest in askesis could be read as a transformative challenge to this Nietzschean narrative. My own interests tend to revolve around two related stories: Christianity as a perpetuation of the docility, control, and hierarchy already endemic to Western metaphysics (i.e., Christianity as a “Platonism for the masses”); and Paulinism as another instance with which Foucault could have altered the received story.

10. I am thinking of Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999); and Peter Sloterdijk, Du Musst dein Leben ändern: Über Anthropotechnik (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2011).

11. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure (New York: Vintage, 1988), p. 4.

13. Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). p. 399.

14. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (London: Continuum, 1997), p. 198.

15. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 2:12.

16. Note the discussion of Schweitzer’s Jesus as a figure of the end of a “modern” and “liberal” epoch of metaphysical reflection, in chapter 4 of Ward Blanton. Displacing Christian Origins: Philosophy, Secularity, and the New Testaement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

17. For some discussion, see Ward Blanton, “Biblical Scholarship in the Age of Biopower: Albert Schweitzer and the Degenerate Physiology of the Historical Jesus,” Bible and Critical Theory (February 2006): 1–25. I plan to develop a reading of Masoch and the emergence of the category of “messianism” with Yvonne Sherwood in coming months.

18. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 2:5.

19. Numerous references could be mentioned. For now, see the interesting summary of this project in Michel Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” in Martin, Gutman, and Hutton, Technologies of the Self, pp. 16–49.

20. The language of call and response is of course important here inasmuch as Foucault always seemed particularly interested in the relationship between sexual activity and the vicissitudes of speaking about sexual activity.

21. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 2:23ff.

22. Put differently, here we flag the relationship between sexuality, truth, and spiritual direction/exercise which always, in the late Foucault, feed into one another. See, e.g., “Pastoral Power and Political Reason,” in Jeremy Carrette, ed., Religion and Culture: Michel Foucault (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 135–152; see also the fascinating discussions in Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population (New York: Picador, 2009), pp. 135–191, where he faces most directly the Heideggerian question of “man” as the “shepherd of being,” a discussion that is now impossible to hear apart from the more recent appropriations of Foucault on these points by Sloterdijk. In addition to his unfairly condemned “Human Zoo” speech, see Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life (London: Polity, 2012).

23. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 3: The Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1990), p. 45.

24. While they disagree profoundly about the way Paul interacts with Hellenistic philosophical traditions, several crucial touchstones must be mentioned here: Stanley Stowers, A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews, and Gentiles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); Dale B. Martin, The Corinthian Body (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Paul and the Stoics (London: T&T Clark, 2000) and Cosmology and Self in the Apostle Paul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Emma Wasserman, The Death of the Soul in Romans 7: Sin, Death, and the Law in Light of Hellenistic Moral Psychology (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008); George Van Kooten, Paul’s Anthropology in Context (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008); Niko Huttunen, Paul and Epictetus on Law: A Comparison (London: T&T Clark, 2009); Runar Thorsteinsson, Roman Christianity and Roman Stoicism: A Comparative Study of Ancient Morality (London: Oxford University Press, 2010). I discuss this issue in more detail in my afterword to Pier Paolo Pasolini, Saint Paul (London: Verso, 2013).

25. Cf. Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France (1982–1983) (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 43.

26. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations: 1972–1990 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 105.

27. Mika Ojakangas, “On the Pauline Roots of Biopolitics: Apostle Paul in Company with Foucault and Agamben,” Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory 11, no. 1 (2010):92–94. Ojakangas’s engagement with Foucault and Paulinism should be bundled together into a single volume, as he makes important contributions to a developing conversation. See also his “Impossible Dialgue on Biopower: Agamben and Foucult,” Foucault Studies, no. 2 (May 2005): 5–28, and “Michel Foucault and the Enigmatic Origins of Bio-politics and Governmentality,” History of the Human Sciences 25, no. 1 (2012): 1–14.

28. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 3:236.

31. Precisely because of some of the lacunae and traditional stereotyping of distinctions, the work of Foucault on the history of religion needs very much, as a kind of compelling afterword, the understated but powerful study of Dale B. Martin, Inventing Superstition: From the Hippocratics to the Christians (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). Martin’s study maps shifts in ancient medical disourses, varying modes of attention to the body, onto shifts in discourses about religion.

32. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 3:239.

34. This is a typical refrain in the later Foucault, particularly. Note, for example, Foucault’s answer to the question of Hasumi in “Sexuality and Power” in Carrette, Religion and Culture, p. 127f.

35. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 3:239.

37. See Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), especially p. 115, but also pp. 36ff. The periodization and comparative discreteness of identities in these narrations of “Western culture” or the history of religion constitutes their political stakes, which is why calling them into question, rethinking them, tends to subvert the contemporary identities to which these stories provide their orientation. This is no doubt why a reworking of “Paul and the philosophers” sometimes elicits fierce antagonism, though such refigurations may obviously be worked without reference to Paul, as (for example) in the critical works of Ruprecht, who challenges recent influential Christian readings of culture by way of a genealogical subversion of their implicit periodization of the West, e.g., Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., Afterwords: Hellenism, Modernism, and the Myth of Decadence (New York: SUNY Press, 1996).

38. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 3:238.

39. For a very similar type of discussion, see the way Senecan ethical discourse is played off against fourth-century Christian ascetics in Michel Foucault, Du Gouvernement des Vivants: Cours au Collège de France, 1979–1980 (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2012), pp. 219–281.

40. Cf. Michel Foucault, Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973–1974 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 165ff.

41. Moxnes, “Asceticism and Christian Identity in Antiquity,” p. 8.

42. Foucault, Du Gouvernement des Vivants, p. 247.

43. Ibid., cf. pp. 240–241, 246.

44. Theodor Zahn, The Apostle’s Creed: A Sketch of Its History and an Examination of Its Contents, trans. C. S. and A. E. Burn (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1899), p. vii. Incidentally, the question of masculinity and the history of biblical scholarship is woefully underdeveloped, though see the work of Halvor Moxnes which breaks new ground, Jesus and the Rise of Nationalism: A New Quest for the Nineteenth-Century Historical Jesus (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011).

45. J. B. Lightfoot, Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians (London: MacMillan, 1903), p. 308.

47. Theodor Zahn, Introduction to the New Testament (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1909), 1:121.

48. Ibid., 1:114 (my emphasis).

49. I say “extraordinary” in the sense that we really begin to understand Zahn when we realize that, in moments like this, he is more conservative about such matters than Eusebius of Caesarea, that great author of an ecclesiastical history who hoped he could string together historical testimonies in such a way to give Constantine, essentially, an unbroken link—a telegraphic line of signal fires, as he describes it—back to the “origin” of Christianity. On James’s authorship, cf. 2.23–25.

50. Zahn, Introduction to the New Testament, 1:114.

51. Theodor Zahn, Der Stoiker Epiktet und sein Verhältnis zum Christentum (Erlangen: Universitäts-Buchdruckerei von E. Th. Jacob, 1894), p. 3.

52. See especially Zahn’s remarks, ibid., pp. 12, 18, 20.

53. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 3:236.

54. Cf. Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,’ in Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, eds., Religion (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 2, 12, 21.

55. I have explored at length the role of this “little machine” and the starkly destabilizing effect it has on distinctions between religion and secular critique in Ward Blanton, Displacing Christian Origins: Philosophy, Secularity, and the New Testament (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

56. Gershom Scholem would have missed the similarity perhaps (being generally keen to maintain clear lines of distinction between the “Jewish” and the “Christian,” but here it is worth pointing out that there is perhaps a Scholemesque “messianism” operating at the heart of Derrida’s diagnosis of the “little machine” of European self-subversion. The key comparison concerning immanent inversion, undoing from within, and the gesture is the same in both thinkers.

57. Cf. Foucault’s interview, “Iran: the Spirit of a World Without Spirit” reprinted in Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984 (New York: Routledge, 1988), pp. 211–224.

58. Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 38ff.

59. Inasmuch as parrhēsia represents, among other things, a “zero degree of those rhetorical figures which intensify the emotions of the audience,” and this by way of pressing a risky demand for decision, the rhetorical form invites comparison with some characterizations of messianic “shortening” of time (as in Agamben) or Badiou’s (related) “forcing” of an event. Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech (New York: Semiotext(e), 2001), p. 22.

61. Without repeating comparisons that may be found elsewhere (e.g., in the work of Hubert Dreyfus), the way in which bodies, motions, and energies in Heidegger are made available to broader collective agencies and economies fits very well with the way, in Foucault, that docile bodies are precisely those bodies that, as it were, respond or allow themselves to be measured by the feedback mechanisms of economies and broad structures like collective “life.” In both cases the drama of the interpretation emerges from attention to the same basic “dialectical” movement, between generalizing tactics of measuring/framing and specific sites in which those measuring/framing devices find a purchase. The Foucauldian mechanisms productive of docile bodies, mentioned earlier, for example, may be usefully compared to the discussions of “standing reserve” and “enframing” in Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays (San Francisco: Harper, 1977), pp. 3–35.

62. Crockett’s reflections on entropy are essential today more than ever, constituting a kind of quasi-Deleuzean mode of thinking about (in earlier dialectical language) immanent contradiction. See, e.g., his sections on void and entropy in Clayton Crockett, Deleuze Beyond Badiou: Ontology, Multiplicity, and Event (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); and sections on entropy with Jeffrey Robbins in Religion, Politics, and the Earth: The New Materialism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

63. This is, of course, Foucault’s own language, which also constituted his rationale for thinking that discursive and nondiscursive environments of material practices, levied one another, not to mention why he continued to write genealogies of ancient people and distant places. Still very useful is Pamela Major-Poetzl’s study, Michel Foucault’s Archaology of Western Culture: Toward a New Science of History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), particularly chapter 1.

64. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1978), p. 21.

1. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 108–111.

2. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Penguin, 1977), p. 208.

5. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 357.

7. While there is more than an interest in the displacement of model-and-repetition constitutive of representational thought here in Foucault, we should not miss the way it is nevertheless a crucial topic for him. Foucault will refuse some of the obvious similarities at work in the classical episteme and the modern one by pointing to their different mode of relation to the question of representation:

But this play of correspondences must not be allowed to delude us. We must not imagine that the Classical analysis of discourse has continued without modification through the ages merely by applying itself to a new object; that the force of some historical weight has maintained it in its identity, despite so many adjacent mutations. In fact, the four theoretical segments that outlined the space of general grammar have not been preserved: but they were dissociated, they changed both their function and their level, they modified the entire domain of their validity when, at the end of the eighteenth century, the theory of representation was eclipsed…. In contrast [to the classical age], the analysis of man’s mode of being as it has developed since the nineteenth century does not reside within a theory of representation.

Ibid., p. 367.

9. Ibid., p. 364f. Cf. Foucault’s comments about two ways of thinking the ethical, one by the law of the model, the other by modern singularities.

10. Cf. the association of Plato, Aristotle, and Kant under the rubric of “traditional” ontologies as a process of deduction from the general appears, for example, in Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 41; cf. similar discussions in Being and Time (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010), pp. 12–15 (section: int. I, 4); or Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 3–8 (sections 1, 2).

11. Cf. Slavoj Žižek, Bodies Without Organs: On Deleuze and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 183–187, The Parallax View (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), pp. 261–269. I should note that Žižek’s writings contain essential indications also about how to rework precisely these criticisms.

12. Here she is echoing Todd May. See Valérie Nicolet Anderson, “Becoming a Subject: The Case of Michel Foucault and Paul,” Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory 11, no. 1 (2010):140.

13. Her very interesting book on Foucault and Paul came too late to my attention to do it justice here, though I hope to engage some of its arguments in future writing. I suspect we value “narrative” and “self-fashioning” in fruitfully distinct modes. For now, see an agenda-setting book of Valérie Nicolet Anderson, Constructing the Self: Thinking with Paul and Michel Foucault (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012).

14. I should add that I think even fairly recent controversies between latter-day Lacanians, Badioueans, and Deleuzeans are moving onto new terrain. Consider, for example, the differently nuanced inflection of Deleuze’s “quasicause”—a topos related to the ambiguous force of pistis—in Žižek’s Less Than Nothing. Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2012), pp. 853–858, compared to his earlier discussion of the same in Organs Without Bodies (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 26–32. Exemplary in emerging discussions is the perceptive defense of Deleuze in Clayton Crockett, Deleuze Beyond Badiou: Ontology, Multiplicity, and Event (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).

15. I am thinking not only of the way he “Paulinizes” phenomenology in his early lectures on the phenomenology of religious life, effectively procuring “authentic” Paulinism in the same gesture as he lays bear authentic phenomenology (see my discussion of this matter in Displacing Christian Origins), but also—related—of the way he then “atheizes” both Paulinism and phenomenology in Being and Time, a move already there implicitly in his own—and Bultmann’s—reading of Paul. Ward Blanton, Displacing Christian Origins: Philosophy, Secularity, and the New Testament (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 105–128.

16. Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 370.

20. Here the crucial issue is to face directly the contested philosophical modes of understanding excess, clinamen, and objet petit a, as Slavoj Žižek has been doing brilliantly in an engagement with Deleuze and Lacan which seems to me to cut against some of the Deleuze bashing often associated with the work of Hardt and Negri. Cf. Žižek, Less Than Nothing, pp. 852–858.

21. Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 370f.

23. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 298.

25. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 301.

26. Jeffrey T. Nealon, Foucault After Foucault: Power and Its Intensifications Since 1984 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), p. 52.

27. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 206–7.

30. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 27.

31. With the caveat that my (phenomenologically inflected) repetition of Althusser’s interpellation scenario focuses more on the way the effects of the call retroactively constitute the initial “invitation” to be interpellated. Structure and function follow the interpellating performative rather than precede it.

32. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 23.

34. Here I find crucial the remarkably illuminating work of Michael Dillon, who explicates Heidegger and more recent thinkers of the “event” in relation to the fact that “evental” thought is rapidly proliferating across cultural and economic spheres, from managerial training sessions to military tactics and national preparedness strategies. Relationality, openness, and contingency are increasingly the practices of our emerging social ontologies. See, for example, the excellent piece by Michael Dillon, “Specters of Biopolitics: Finitude, Eschaton, and Katechon,” South Atlantic Quarterly110, no. 3 (2011): 780–792, or “Accident, Eschaton, Katechon: Toward a Genealogy of the Event” in his forthcoming book on biopolitics and political theology.

35. See Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp. 108–123. More recent engagements with the relationship between these thinkers may be found in Timothy Rayner, Foucault’s Heidegger: Philosophy and Transformative Experience (London: Continuum, 2007); and Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenburg, eds., Foucault and Heidegger: Critical Encounters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).

36. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (book 17), trans. by Russel Grigg (New York: Norton, 2007), p. 119f.

37. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. by A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 47.

38. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge: Belknap, 2009). For the genealogical story, see chapter 1, “Productive Bodies”, especially pp. 30ff. Their genealogy is provocative and invites much-needed further reflection about the relation between capitalism and the turn to the phenomena of everyday life within fin-de-siecle continental philosophy (cf. within phenomenology, hermeneutics, linguistic philosophy of Wittgenstein). At that later point, the same move was occurring in other fields as well and has a bearing on the way in which biblical studies moved, in a sweeping shift in paradigms, to “apocalypticism” as an essential name under which to understand early Christian religion. In a word, this was the emergence of those central touchstone within New Testament interpretation, from the Pauline “event” to Jesus’s “apocalyptic” relation to the world at hand. I explore some of the important issues in the chapters about Heidegger and Schweitzer, respectively, in Displacing Christian Origins.

39. Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, p. 31.

41. Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), p. 39.

44. Roberto Esposito, Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life, trans. Zakiya Hanafi (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), p. 65.

45. See the preface of Antonio Negri’s Labor of Job, trans. Matteo Mandarini (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).

46. My colleague Yvonne Sherwood, who is worlds more a sophisticated interpreter of Job than I ever will be, points out that this may be a flat-footed reading inasmuch as the (ambiguously) narrative/divine voice at the end of the biblical book does not uniformly or without qualification dismiss the counselors. She will forgive me if, for the present, I let the reading slide. One should nevertheless note the important work on such topics in Abigail Pelham, Contested Creations in the Book of Job: The-World-As-It-Ought-and-Ought-Not-to-Be (Berlin: Brill, 2012).

47. Negri, Labor of Job, p. xix.

48. Ibid., p. xxiii.

49. Important to note here is the groundbreaking genealogy constituted by the work of Roland Boer. See the books in the Historical Materialism series of Haymarket Books: Criticism of Heaven; Criticism of Theology; Criticism of Religion; Criticism of Earth; and also his Political Myth: On the Use and Abuse of Biblical Themes (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). I imagine that Boer would resist my “excessive reduction” (so to speak) of ontology to structures of quasi-cause, retroactive positing of causality, objet a, or swerved pistis, Boer preferring a more elaborately Marxist theory of structured social production. No doubt his remarks on this topic would be, as ever, provocatively illuminating.

50. For the general dynamics—and an effort to situate them in historical and cultural context—see chs. 1 and 2 of my Displacing Christian Origins.

51. Jean Baudrillard, Forget Foucault (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), p. 34.

53. Ibid., p. 37. Needless to say, I do not agree that Baudrillard is here different from Foucault and Deleuze, neither of whom seems to me to be at all interested in a fetishization of a panlogicism of transparency!

55. The language of exorcism is common enough in Baudrillard’s interventions, not only here, but see, e.g., Jean Baudrillard, Impossible Exchange (London: Verso, 2001), p. 142f.

56. Baudrillard, Forget Foucault, 63.

57. In this respect we could chalk Deleuze up to yet another amazing thinker who misses his own affinities with Paulinism. Consider Deleuze’s essay “Nietzsche and Saint Paul, Lawrence and John of Patmos,” in Ward Blanton and Hent de Vries, eds., Paul and the Philosophers (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). Note also Clayton Crockett’s excellent Paulinist exposition of a Deleuzean philosophy of immanence and difference in the same volume, “Radical Theology and the Event: Saint Paul with Deleuze.”

58. Gilles Deleuze and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty and Venus in Furs (New York: Zone, 1991), p. 89.

59. I have noted before Troels Engberg-Pedersen’s compelling arguments that Paul is in 1 Corinthians 15 opposing a Stoic immanence of the “spiritual body” to the more Philonic dualisms evident among the Corinthian believers. Engberg-Pedersen’s work is a breakthrough, not just in the way it provides a viable ancient philosophical context for Pauline drama but also for the way it encourages us to reflect on how it is specifically a modern immanence which is so actively conjuring a “return” of Paulinist tropes within cultural reflection. See Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Cosmology and Self in the Apostle Paul: The Material Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

60. Deleuze and Sacher-Masoch, Masochism, p. 89.

61. Cf. Gilles Deleuze, What Is Philosophy? (London: Verso, 1994), p. 55.

62. Deleuze and Sacher-Masoch, Masochism, p. 88.

66. Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 245–246.

67. Indeed, “So that Paul teaches exactly the same as ourselves.” See Benedict de Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise (New York: Dover, 1951), p. 53.

68. Cf. Crockett’s “Radical Theology and the Event.”

69. Baudrillard, Forget Foucault, p. 65.

70. Michel Foucault. Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside (New York: Zone, 1990), p. 22.

71. See Slavoj Žižek, “The Necessity of a Dead Bird: Paul’s Communism,” in Blanton and de Vries, Paul and the Philosophers.

72. See, respectively, Stanislas Breton, Théorie des Idéologies (Paris: Desclée, 1976), pp. 31–34, 47–49, 92–98, and “Portrait du Rien,” in Philosophie Buissonnière (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1989), pp. 65–74. Elsewhere he makes clear his thinking of ontology in relation to Paul’s logos of a cross by comparing it to the theme of ontological exodus in the writing of Meister Eckhart. See Stanislaw Breton, Philosophie et mystique: Existence et surexistence (Paris: Jérôme Millon, 1996), 89–110.

73. See Negri, The Labor of Job, p. 13f.

74. I should add that Negri’s statements on the matter are clear. See, for example, Michael Negri, Diary of an Escape (London: Polity, 2010).

75. I borrow the language from Lawrence Welborn’s excellent book, Paul, a Fool of Christ: A Study of 1 Corinthians 1–4 in the Comic-Philosophic Tradition (London: T&T Clark, 2005).

76. See Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 4. This is not the time to explore the full significance of Taussig’s work for a reading of the historical Paul’s effort to engage the “magic of the [Roman] state.” For an excellent engagement with Taussig, see Kenneth Surin, “The Sovereign Individual and Mchael Taussig’s Politics of Defacement,” in Nepantla: Views from South 2, no. 1(2001), pp. 205–220.

77. I say so-called Christians, of course, to remind us that the word itself is not actually Pauline and would have been rejected by him were it to have any connotations of not being Jewish.

78. The weakness and, properly speaking, stupidity of the gesture itself deserves more attention here, as what is at stake is not a romanticizing of powerlessness but a paradoxical reworking of notions of power and agency. In this respect, I do not know of better interlocutors for these suggestions of Paul than Taussig, Stanislas Breton, or (to mention but one more) the striking effort to rethink nonbeing, possibility, and necessity in Edith Wyschogrod, Saints and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990, though she does not engage directly with Paul. Her own work on these categories comes to the same peculiar conclusion, however, and it may be a good indication of why Paulinist weakness and stupidity—and this in the act of community formation—have returned with such a forcefulness in these diverse fields: “The saint’s life is not simply one of action but one of authorized action. The authorization of moral action in a postmodern context in which the general presuppositions for authoritative discourse fall under criticism requires renouncing power” (ibid., 60). Viewed also in relationship to the question of revolutionary violence, such is ultimately the question posed by Badiou’s Incident at Antioch. See Alain Badiou, The Incident at Antioch (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). The farthest thing from that closure, leveraging, and sacrifice constituting an act under a metaphysical warranty, there is what Julia Reinhard Lupton might call a “Paul-effect” that rather concerns a moment of the crisis of legitimation.

79. 1 Corinthians 1:23f.

80. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 20), p. 91.

83. Cf. ibid., pp. 93, 97.

84. Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (London: Verso, 2008), p. 1.

85. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, p. 88. See Stanislas Breton, Saint Paul, trans. Joseph Ballan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). For Breton’s references to Paulinist meontology more generally, see Théorie des Idéologies, p. 47. Breton discerned Paulinist meontology above all in 1 Corinthians 1 and the hymn of Christ’s kenotic self-emptying in Philippians 2. See also Stanislas Breton, The Word and the Cross, trans. Jacquelyn Porter (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002).

86. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, p. 100.

87. To my knowledge, the lecture to which I refer by Timothy Mitchell, “The Virtues of Recalcitrance: Democracy from Foucault to Latour” (addressed to a conference at UCLA entitled Foucault and Middle East Studies, April 28, 2009), is not yet in print, though currently accessible in downloadable audio form at http://www.international.ucla.edu/cnes/podcasts/.

88. Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being: Hors-Texte (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 87.

90. An excellent engagement with Marion and Derrida on just this point may be found in Thomas A. Carlson, Indiscretion: Finitude and the Naming of God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 190–237.

91. Jon Sobrino, No Salvation Outside the Poor: Prophetic-Utopian Essays (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2008), pp. 4, 35, 12. Thanks to Neil Elliott for the suggestion to see what Sobrino does with ta mē onta.

92. Baudrillard, Forget Foucault, p. 63.

93. I echo the title of a wonderful book in fond memory of the recently departed Friedrich Kittler.

94. John Riches, Galatians Through the Centuries (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 141f. See also Ueda Shizuteru, “Jesus in Contemporary Japanese Zen: With Special Regard to Keiji Nishitani,” in Perry Schmidt-Leukel and G. Köberlin, eds., Buddhist Perceptions of Jesus: Papers of the Third Conference of the European Network of Buddhist-Christian Studies (St. Ottillien: EOS, 1999). I am grateful to two excellent colleagues, Gereon Kopf at Luther College and Perry Schmidt-Leukel at the University of Glasgow, for their intriguing suggestions about some of these things, which I hope to speak about at more length elsewhere.

95. Ibid., citing Ueda Shizuteru.

96. See his articulation of the “undead” in Eric Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), but also his readings of Paul in this light within On Creaturely Life: Benjamin, Sebald (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

Now that the Verso publication of Pasolini’s notes will soon be available, I will not repeat my earlier plot summaries of Pasolini’s screenplay; see Ward Blanton, “‘Reapperance of Paul, Sick,” Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory 11, no. 1 (Winter 2010): 52–77. Plus, the translator’s introduction of Elizabeth Castelli is extraordinary to the point that I want to be sure only to point readers in that direction rather than tread similar territory less effectively here. Instead I will focus here on comparative theoretical issues surrounding Pasolini’s creative intervention.

1. It has become an unfortunate stereotype among critical theorists reading nineteenth-century biblical scholarship that there is something politically debilitating about the proliferating modes of concreteness in expression among “apocalyptic” texts as opposed to, say, “messianic” or “prophetic” literature. It is a topic for another time, but this seems to me really unhelpful for thinking about images and openness, but also for thinking about the ancient “politics” of these movements.

2. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Petrolio, trans. Ann Goldstein (London: Secker and Warburg, 1997), p. 74. Pasolini’s note about the handling of Petrolio (1973) suggests it was underway while he was also working on the screenplay about Paul (1968–72).

3. Franco “Bifo” Berardi, The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy. trans. Francesca Cadel and Giuseppina Mecchia (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), p. 59. As part of the analogical/apocalyptic play of figures and frameworks, it is worth pointing out that Berardi’s articulation of this emergence of a new economy of desiring production in the late 1960s and ’70s was itself marked by a return of Italian theorists at during this period to the Marx of the Grundrisse. It is worth wondering whether there is a developing intensification of a Marxian problematic that governs the way critical theory has been, as it were, increasingly haunted by the spectral return of Paulinism, from the dialectically understood Paul of the Tübingen school during the writing of Marx’s Grundrisse to Pasolini’s Paul at a moment of “return” to the Grundrisse, to an explosion of competing theoretical Paulinisms (e.g., Jacob Taubes, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Žižek) at a moment when the dialectical poles become more decidedly indistinguishable or “negative.” While a great deal needs to be done, Boer has more than anyone else diagnosed the mutually implicated trajectories of Marxist and biblical scholarship. See, e.g., his twin books, Roland Boer, Criticism of Heaven (London: Haymarket, 2009) and Criticism of Religion (London: Haymarket, 2011), as well as Political Myth (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). More focused on contemporary ideology criticism, see also James Crossley, Jesus in an Age of Neoliberalism: Quests, Scholarship, and Ideology (London: Equinox, 2012); or the philosophically focused story of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century biblical scholarship in Ward Blanton, Displacing Christian Origins: Philosophy, Secularity, and the New Testament (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

4. Berardi’s own work, of course, emerges from within a vibrant and developing tradition of Italian critical theory for whom the diagnosis of these decades and their ongoing political significance is both essential and contested. A fuller contextualization of these texts, Pasolini’s and Berardi’s, within a specifically Italian critical theory (or, by the same token, a specifically Italian film history) is not my aim at the present, in part because my work is focused on the first-century Greek pole of my analogical Greek-Italian-English story of the screenplay, a comparative pole which is still underdeveloped even amidst the high profile “return” of Paulinism as a comparative touchstone for philosophy and critical theory. Nevertheless, without suggesting “to cover” this side of the comparative story, for those interested one should mention (in addition to studies I discuss further on) at least two efforts to situate and present the larger theoretical debates, Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno, eds., Radical Political Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); and Lorenzo Chiesa and Alberto Toscano, eds., The Italian Difference: Between Nihilism and Politics (Melbourne: re.press, 2009).

5. Rather than to expand the list of Italianists obsessed with questions of biopolitics, I will simply mention here the attempt at a synthesis of Andrea Righi, Biopolitics and Social Change in Italy: From Gramsci to Pasolini to Negri (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

6. As we will see, I read Pasolini’s moves against the backdrop of rich comparative discussions of “Oedipus” in Paris. For an important evaluation of this period, see Miriam Leonard, Athens in Paris: Ancient Greece and the Political in Postwar French Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

7. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Tetis,” in Patrick Rumble and Bart Testa, eds., Pier Paolo Pasolini: Contemporary Perspectives (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), p. 248.

8. Righi, Biopolitics and Social Change in Italy, p. 89.

In Salò, sexual acts are totally brutal and without preamble; its victims do not undress but appear nude, lined up as if awaiting the gas chambers. In this sexual lager, no real jouissance is possible. Its tortured victims bear no resemblance to the heroines of a certain pornographic tradition who achieve pleasure through pain. And even their executioners, that is, the libertines, do not attain the pleasure they so endlessly seek. Meticulous bureaucrats, banal torturers, Pasolini’s libertines are driven not by the energy or the pulsing of desire but by impotence and frustration.

9. Jacques Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII), trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 2007), p. 19f.

10. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Continuum, 2004); Jean-Francois Lyotard, Libidinal Economy (London: Continuum, 2004); Jacques Derrida, Dissemination (London: Continuum, 2004); and Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society (London: Sage, 1998).

11. While they disagree profoundly about the way Paul interacts with Hellenistic philosophical traditions, several crucial touchstones must be mentioned here: Stanley Stowers, A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews, and Gentiles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); Dale B. Martin, The Corinthian Body (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Paul and the Stoics (London: T&T Clark, 2000) and Cosmology and Self in the Apostle Paul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Emma Wasserman, The Death of the Soul in Romans 7: Sin, Death, and the Law in Light of Hellenistic Moral Psychology (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008); George Van Kooten, Paul’s Anthropology in Context (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008); Niko Huttunen, Paul and Epictetus on Law: A Comparison (London: T&T Clark, 2009); and Runar Thorsteinsson, Roman Christianity and Roman Stoicism: A Comparative Study of Ancient Morality (London: Oxford University Press, 2010).

12. For further discussion, see my introduction, “Back to the New Archive,” to Ward Blanton and Hent de Vries, eds., Paul and the Philosophers (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012).

13. We should note immediately that discourses about nomos in ancient Mediterranean contexts afforded a panoply of modes by which to double, and effectively to circumvent, sublimate, or negate the value of a particular instance of nomos. Philosophers, of course, regularly switched codes from ethnic to natural law, often precisely in order to allow the doubling and displacement of nomos as a mode of escaping the effective operation of the local or the allegedly general. Jewish traditions from Josephus to Philo to the texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls perform similar operations, sometimes adding additional tricks about the (oral or written) media of nomological discourse. In a word, in moments like these Paul inhabits, rather than subtracts himself from, Jewish and philosophical traditions alike. Two very important efforts to locate Pauline discussions of nomos within their general Greco-Roman environments are Brigitte Kahl, Galatians Re-imagined: Reading with the Eyes of the Vanquished (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010); and Davina Lopez, Apostle to the Conquered: Re-imagining Paul’s Mission (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010).

14. Josephus. Antiquities 2.239.1.

15. See, e.g., the “discussion on sin” in Georges Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); and the reference to hyperbolic sin in the lecture “On the Moral Law” in Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959–60), trans. Dennis Porter (London, 1992), p. 84.

16. For an excellent discussion of Schmittian exceptionalism, with an accompanying genealogy of Schmitt’s precursors, see Marc de Wilde’s excellent essay, “Politics Between Times. Theologico-Political Interpretations of the Restraining Force (katechon) in Paul’s Second Letter to the Thessalonians” in Blanton and de Vries, Paul and the Philosophers.

17. Ancient discussions assumed that the fund of aphormē could be borrowed, saved, and the origination of new enterprises (cf. Xenophon, Memorabilia 2.7.12; 3.12.4), or even the distributed fund of the state itself (cf. Aristotle, Politics 6.1320a39).

18. See Gil Anidjar, “Freud’s Jesus (Paul’s War),” in Blanton and de Vries, Paul and the Philosophers. Several other comparative encounters with Pauline and Schmittian topics of the katechon or restrainer of political catastrophe may be found in the excellent work of Michael Dillon, “Spectres of Biopolitcs: Eschatology, Katechon and Resistance,” in South Atlantic Quarterly 110 (Summer 2011): 3; Sergei Prozorov, “From Katechon to Intrigant: The Breakdown of the Post-Soviet Nomos,” in Alexander Astrov, ed., The Great Power (mis)Management: The Russian-Georgian War and Its Implications for the Global Order (Surrey: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 25–42; and (implicitly, through his longer history of scholarship on Schmitt) Mika Ojakangas, “Michel Foucault and the Enigmatic Origins of Bio-politics and Governmentality,” in History of the Human Sciences 25, no. 1 (2012): 1–14; and Michael Hoelzl, “Before the Anti-Christ is Revealed: On the Katechontic Structure of Messianic Time,” in Arthur Bradley and Paul Fletcher, eds., The Politics to Come: Power, Modernity and the Messianic (London: Continuum, 2010), pp. 98–110.

19. It is not merely incidental that the seizure of chance which Philo opposes here concerns the construction of forms of causality, the intimate issue of chance’s “seizure.”

20. It is the careful sequestering of its own limited ownerships of power by contemporary piety which fails to see the cheeky Pauline inversion of Moses’s veiled glory as as a glory katargoumenēn in 2 Corinthians 3.

21. For an excellent discussion of the role of Joyce as exemplar of a quasi-emancipatory fidelity to one’s (singular) symptom, see Lorenzo Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), pp. 188ff.

22. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959–60), p. 177.

23. Lacan. The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, p. 19f.

24. A. Kiarina Kordela, $urplus: Spinoza, Lacan (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), p. 38.

25. Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, pp. 119f. “By the end of her article Marie-Clare Boons would even give us to understand that many things flow from this death of the father and notably a certain something that would make it the case that in some way psychoanalysis frees us from the law…. Fat chance” (119).

1. Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All Too Human (New York: Penguin, 1984), section 20, in this translation p. 28.

2. As should be clear from the discussions in the various chapters here, this is of course just to name two forensic, technical shifts which make possible the recovery of Paul in concrete shoes, the relationalities constituting the shifting object of our discussions being more diffuse and expansive. As if to recall the path of the “material” swerve of difference, we note:

It should above all remind us that the said archival technology no longer determines, will never have determined, merely the moment of the conservational recording, but rather the very institution of the archivable event. It conditions not only the form or the structure that prints, but the printed content of the printing: the pressure of the printing, the impression, before the division between the printed and the printer. This archival technique has commanded that which in the past even instituted and constituted whatever there was as anticipation of the future.