Radical Political Theology: Religion and Politics After Liberalism

THIS CHAPTER CONTINUES TO ELABORATE ON SOME OF THE theological implications of Deleuze’s notion of the event, which was discussed in the previous chapter in relation to law and the unconscious. The event is an unconscious rather than simply a conscious or intentional event, and it is productive of a different kind of law, a law beyond law that exceeds bio-political control. The law of the unconscious event is also much different from either the nostalgic restoration of modern liberal law in a cynical era or the scripturalist restoration of divine law to solve the problems of human fallibility. The unconscious event is potential or virtual rather than simply actual, in terms of the discussion in the introduction. Here I further develop my understanding of the Deleuzian event by reading him with some of the current theoretical discourse about St. Paul.

The apostle Paul has been the focus of many recent philosophical and theological discussions of law and event, especially in the context of Continental philosophy. But, Deleuze’s philosophy has not been considered as a contemporary referent for most discussions of Paul, mainly because of Deleuze’s antipathy toward Paul, following that of Nietzsche.¹ Paul is important theologically because he is the first and most influential Christian theologian. Paul is also significant politically, as he is seen more and more radically as a powerful critic of the first-century Roman Empire. The United States considers itself a democratic republic, but its actions and status appear more imperial in the early twenty-first century, and the analogy holds even if the American Empire is declining financially and economically much faster than the Roman Empire did.

The contemporary theoretical engagement with St. Paul has been touched off largely by Alain Badiou’s book St. Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Badiou reads Paul as a “poet-thinker of the event,” as well as a militant figure in his uncompromising fidelity to the event.² Badiou reads Paul as an atheist; that is, Badiou discounts the truth of Paul’s event, which is the resurrection of Jesus Christ.³ Badiou desires to capture the militant fidelity of Paul’s example for contemporary politics, although he brackets the particular truth of Paul’s revelation.

In the United States, this encounter has largely been an encounter between Continental philosophy and historical New Testament scholarship.⁴ Into this exchange, I want to insert theology as a “vanishing mediator.” Slavoj Žižek, who has done much to bring the significance of Badiou’s work to an English-speaking public, borrows the term “vanishing mediator” from Frederic Jameson to relate German Idealism, particularly Schelling, to Lacanian psychoanalysis in The Indivisible Remainder.⁵ A vanishing mediator is a third that brings together two alternatives or oppositions, but in doing so hides itself in such a way that it seems to vanish, and most readers remain stuck within an alternative or oppositional logic. Ironically, theology becomes a vanishing mediator in contemporary discussions of Paul that oppose interpretive-philosophical and historical-exegetical strategies.

Theology, however, is not simple or self-identical in its nature. Rather, it is divided at its origin into a traditional theology and a radical theology. This division is structurally similar to Derrida’s distinction between two essential sources of religion, “the experience of belief ” and “the experience of the unscathed, of sacredness or of holiness,” in his essay “Faith and Knowledge.”⁶ Traditional or orthodox theology is more concerned with restoring Paul to his originary stature as the primary apostle and theologian of the resurrection event and reclaiming or reestablishing fidelity to the truth of this event, however that is interpreted or understood, literally or metaphorically. But radical theology is willing to follow Badiou and set the “event” free from the resurrection and read St. Paul under the pressure of the death of God.

Radical theology is here the penumbral shadow of the more properly atheistic philosophy of Badiou and Žižek, but it retains the form of theology as a discourse in its willingness to think philosophical formulations in their ultimacy and pressure their meaning and value. According to Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Pierre Klossowski in an appendix to The Logic of Sense,

In this chapter, I will reflect from the viewpoint of radical theology about the event of Paul’s thought as it affects contemporary theory, which is ultimately a thinking of the event. Deleuze’s understanding of the becoming of the event implicitly contrasts with and pressures Badiou’s Platonic reading concerning the possibility of an event that coheres into an ontology and Žižek’s dialectical and Hegelian reading of the event as an incredible contradictory tension. That is, I do not directly engage Žižek and Badiou, but their interpretations of the event provide a context for my reading of Deleuze.

To investigate the temporality of the event, I will demonstrate that, despite superficial appearances to the contrary, there is a resemblance between Heidegger’s temporality, which in its early version is inspired by Paul, and Deleuze’s exposition of the syntheses of time in Difference and Repetition. The temporality of repetition in Difference and Repetition rebounds in The Logic of Sense into a thinking of the event. These Deleuzian theses all pertain to what I claim is ultimately a theological question, that is, “What is an event?” By naming Deleuze as the contemporary thinker of the event, I am associating Deleuze with St. Paul, despite Deleuze’s declared opposition to Paul, following Nietzsche. Although Deleuze follows Nietzsche too closely in his antipathy toward St. Paul on the topic of judgment, by following the thread of the event we can assemble a Paul-effect for Deleuze. This project also involves folding Deleuze’s other saint, Spinoza, back toward St. Paul. Finally, at the end of the chapter I will consider some of the contemporary political stakes of this reading of Paul and the event.

Paul is the original Christian theologian, the closest interpretive account we can get of the event of Christ. Nietzsche calls Paul the first Christian, which is a derogatory charge, and says that Paul mistakes or distorts the essence of Jesus’s quietist asceticism and creates a persecution-machine, a priestly form of religion that encapsulates Platonism for the masses, whose main function is to root out and destroy profound and powerful desires.⁹ A century later, however, Jacob Taubes makes a similar claim without the negative connotations. “My thesis implies,” Taubes writes, “that Christianity has its origin not properly in Jesus but in Paul.”¹⁰ In fact, Taubes argues that Paul reduces Jesus’s dual commandment to love God and to love the neighbor, condensing it into one commandment, to love one’s neighbor: “No dual commandment, but rather one commandment. I regard this as an absolutely revolutionary act.”¹¹ This is Paul as precursor to Emmanuel Levinas.

Now, I am not reconstructing Paul’s understanding of time in a historical sense, but rather showing how a certain interpretation of Paul provides the impetus for an altered approach to temporality that marks twentieth-century philosophy. Heidegger’s thought of being is indebted to his study of Aristotle in the 1920s, but his understanding of temporality can be traced to his phenomenological studies of early Christianity. In The Phenomenology of Religious Life, Heidegger grapples with Paul in his attempt to develop a phenomenological method that is adequate to lived experience.

Heidegger explains his notion of formal indication early in The Phenomenology of Religious Life, in the context of an encounter with early Christianity. The formal indication is a more subtle, supple, and concrete way of thinking historical relationship and continuity than the general notions on which philosophy usually relies. The formal indication communicates, above all, a situation, or what is decisive in “factical life experience itself.”¹² Furthermore, this situation is paradigmatically related to Paul’s existential situation, that is, Paul’s historical enactment of proclamation. Heidegger, like Badiou, brackets the specific content of the object of proclamation (Jesus as Messiah) but stresses that “Christian religiosity lives temporality.” This is a formalization, but not an abstract, empty formalization, because what is essential about early, Pauline Christian experience is its distinctive relationship with historical existence. Heidegger writes, “Christian factical life experience is historically determined by its emergence with the proclamation that hits the people in a moment, and this is unceasingly also alive in the enactment of life.”¹³ The temporal structure of proclamation, in the concrete situation in which Paul proclaims it, provides Heidegger with a key—a formal indication—to the nature of temporality itself: “Christian religiosity lives temporality as such.”¹⁴

This primordial insight into temporality that Heidegger finds in Paul lies at the heart of the fuller expression of temporality as historical existence in Being and Time. Heidegger opposes his phenomenological and existential description of time to a linear conception of time understood as a progressive sequence of moments or now-points. In Being and Time, Heidegger produces an existential analytic of the experience of being-in-the-world on the part of the being that can ask the question of being, or Dasein. Being is understood as care, or concerned existence, and Dasein is concerned about its existence because it exists temporally. Attention to concerned existence uncovers a more authentic understanding of time, and prescribes a more authentic existential being-in-the-world. In Being and Time, an authentic experience of time replaces the specifically Christian and Pauline notion of the proclamation of the event.

Heidegger explains the co-implication of past, present and future as follows:

According to Heidegger, the essence of being is time. Time is not linear, however; it is projected towards the future as it faces and grasps the past in the present moment. Dasein experiences being historically, as temporality. This temporality is lived historically because only in its relation to its past does Dasein extend into the future. The present is an effect of this attempt to take account of existence as Dasein undergoes the experience of being thrown into the world. Future, past, and present are folded together into the existence of the human being in a complicated way that is actualized in existence as a repetition. Because Dasein is oriented toward the past, it experiences temporality as a kind of repetition into the future.

In some ways, chapter 2 of Difference and Repetition can be read as a commentary on this sentence of Heidegger in Being and Time, in which Deleuze attempts to radicalize Heidegger even further toward difference and the future. In his later work, Heidegger attempts to retain the force of this insight into temporality while abandoning the subjective and humanistic connotations of thinking being from the standpoint of Dasein, and in particular Heidegger abandons any attempt to grasp temporality existentially and turns toward an understanding of how the event (Ereignis) of being in its temporal occurring appropriates us within it.

Although Deleuze is more explicitly influenced by Bergson, a careful reading of Difference and Repetition shows that Heidegger’s thought is present, most explicitly in the “Note on Heidegger’s Philosophy of Difference” that is appended onto the end of chapter 1. Deleuze explains that difference in Heidegger does not primarily concern negation: “the not expresses not the negative but the difference between Being and being,” which is ontological difference. Furthermore, “this difference is not ‘between’ in the ordinary sense of the word. It is the Fold, Zwiefalt. It is constitutive of Being and of the manner in which Being constitutes being, in the double movement of ‘clearing’ and ‘veiling.’”¹⁶ Deleuze develops a more elaborate thinking of the Fold in a metaphysical sense in The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, but already in Difference and Repetition the three syntheses of time in chapter 2, “Repetition for Itself,” take the form of a fold or a folding. Just as Heidegger elaborates an ontological thinking of time in opposition to modern conceptions of subjectivity in Being and Time, in Difference and Repetition Deleuze enacts an ecstatic temporality in a threefold process dislocated from any substantial subjectivity.

An event takes place; it occurs in and as time. Deleuze does not use the language of event in Difference and Repetition, but in many ways his thought here concerns the same topic as The Logic of Sense, which explicitly grapples with the logic of the event, and in Difference and Repetition the authentic repetition of difference should be understood as constituting an event. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze constructs a notion of repetition that is based on difference rather than identity. Repetition occurs temporally, with three syntheses of time divided into past, present, and future. Temporal synthesis or repetition constructs the subject, rather than a self-identical subject undergoing or performing a repetition. The self is constructed by temporal syntheses as, for Heidegger, Dasein is temporal existence. The difference is that for Heidegger, Dasein is essentially historical and oriented toward the past, while for Deleuze repetition based on difference is ultimately futural.

The first form of repetition, which Deleuze calls a “passive synthesis,” takes place under the sign of the present. The passive synthesis of imagination from Hume to Bergson constitutes the most basic form of experience, which is habit. A habit is a contraction that draws difference from repetition, and “these thousands of habits of which we are composed … thus form the basic domain of passive syntheses.” Finally, “the world of passive syntheses constitutes the system of the self,” but is a multiple and “dissolved self.”¹⁷ The first synthesis of time “constitutes time as a present, but a present which passes.”¹⁸ The first synthesis can only take place within the framework of a second synthesis, that of memory.

Memory is an active synthesis; it constitutes time “as the embedding of presents themselves.” Deleuze appeals to Bergson’s Matter and Memory and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time to explain how time as memory forms a representation that grounds the time of the first synthesis. Memory is an active synthesis because it provides context and continuity for experiences, as well as an orientation. This orientation is also always toward the past, because the second form of time synthesizes what has passed. The pure past in itself is reconstructed or resurrected out of contemporary experience to envelope it: “the present exists, but the past alone insists and provides the element in which the present passes and successive elements are telescoped.”¹⁹

Now, the problem becomes the difference between the active and passive syntheses, which leads to the third synthesis of time, the futural. Deleuze introduces the third form of time by way of Kant’s transcendental philosophy, which takes “the form of a transcendental Difference between the Determination as such and what it determines.”²⁰ Kant determines existence with the “I think,” which takes place as a determination of time. Kant thereby uncovers “a paradox of inner sense,” because the temporal determination of identity also undermines it, dividing it in two. The Kantian self is split between the active transcendental apperception that performs the syntheses of knowledge and the empirical ego that appears under the transcendental conditions of representation.

According to Deleuze, Kant incorporates time into the subject, an event that fractures the subject: “It is as though the I were fractured from one end to the other; fractured by the pure and empty form of time.”²¹ This pure and empty form of time is the third form of time, which both conjoins and disjoins the previous two. Deleuze claims that “time itself unfolds (that is, apparently ceases to be a circle) instead of things unfolding in it (following the overly simple circular figure).”²² Time ceases to take the form of a circle and unravels or unfolds. Time takes the form of a caesura, a development that both fractures the I and signals the death of God. “If the greatest initiative of transcendental philosophy was to introduce the form of time into thought as such,” Deleuze writes, “this pure and empty form in turn signifies indissolubly the death of God, the fractured I and the passive self.”²³ Furthermore, Deleuze asserts that it is Hölderlin who draws out the consequences of Kantian thought here and is the true successor to Kant: “it is Hölderlin, who discovers the emptiness of pure time and, in this emptiness, simultaneously the continued diversion of the divine, the prolonged fracture of the I and the constitutive passive of the self.”²⁴ Hölderlin, of course, is for Heidegger the poet-thinker par excellence, and this discussion of time in Difference and Repetition can be read as broadly Heideggerian.

Repetition is the production of something new rather than the repetition of something previously existing, and the third synthesis, the pure form of time, indicates this aspect of repetition. The third repetition is “the repetition of the future as eternal return.”²⁵ By associating Nietzsche’s thinking of the eternal return with the pure and empty form of time, Deleuze provides an alternative reading of Nietzsche, based on his earlier book Nietzsche and Philosophy, where the eternal return is not circular or substantial because only what is different returns, or what returns is always different.

The third synthesis is the “final synthesis of time,” in which “the present and past are in turn no more than dimensions of the future.”²⁶ The three forms of time are modes of repetition, but Deleuze arranges all of them under the sign of the future. Repetition is essentially futural rather than recollective or passively constitutive. Deleuze mentions Kierkegaard and Charles Péguy as important thinkers of repetition, but he criticizes them “because they were not ready to pay the necessary price. The entrusted this supreme repetition, repetition as a category of the future, to faith.”²⁷ Faith is problematic for Deleuze because it restores or resurrects God and the self beyond all authentic repetition. Faith is inescapable for belief; but when it becomes hypostasized as a vague but determined future, it becomes comic. In reference to Kierkegaard and Péguy, Deleuze claims that “there is an adventure of faith, according to which one is the clown of one’s own faith, the comedian of one’s ideal.”²⁸

Deleuze names the pure form of time “death.” Death is the disjunction of life, the fracture or split within the living being, that cannot be reduced to negation or limitation. Paul’s proclamation is a work against death, but death (the death of Christ) is what makes Paul’s proclamation possible, makes it an event. Death is the death of identity in the process of eternal recurrence. This death splits time into past (active synthesis, memory) and present (passive synthesis, habit), and it is what gives a future, Deleuze proclaims, following Nietzsche, Paul’s antipode. Resurrection is not resurrection of any prior identity; it does not preserve the substance of self, Christ or God. To have faith is to roll the dice, not to have the certainty of true belief. Living is being-towards-death, but death is not simply the terminus or telos of life; it is that which makes living possible, that from which life proceeds.

Identity is an effect of difference. Differences are primary and constitute identities, which are not identical, but similar. At the secondary level, differences differentiate, that is, “they relate the first-degree differences to one another.”²⁹ Deleuze explains this process in relation to Heidegger:

In accordance with Heidegger’s ontological intuition, difference must be articulation and connection in itself; it must relate different to different without any mediation whatsoever by the identical, the similar, the analogous or the opposed. There must be a differenciation of difference, an in-itself which is like a differentiator, a Sich-unterscheidende, by virtue of which the different is gathered all at once rather than represented on condition of a prior resemblance, identity, analogy or opposition.³⁰

The dark precursor is “a force which ensures communication,” because although “thunderbolts explode between their different intensities … they are preceded in their path by an invisible, imperceptible dark precursor, which determines their path in advance but in reverse, as though intagliated.”³¹ The dark precursor names the productive aspect of the empty form of time. The thunderbolt is the event, but it is presaged by the dark precursor, which Deleuze in the Logic of Sense calls the “void.” The dark precursor generates sense. The dark precursor is the Heideggerian Not, das Nicht, or as Deleuze suggests earlier in chapter 1, the Zweifalt that relates Being and being. Deleuze also says that Heidegger does not goes far enough in his attempt to think “original difference” because Heidegger cannot conceive being as “truly disengaged from any subordination in relation to the identity of representation.”³² Deleuze radicalizes Heidegger’s philosophy of difference and does so primarily through his reading of Nietzsche’s eternal return against Heidegger’s critique of Nietzsche as the last metaphysician. Nietzsche provides an interpretation of the third form of time that is productive because repetition is solely and completely related to difference.

I am suggesting that a careful reading of Difference and Repetition betrays Heideggerian themes, most importantly concerning Deleuze’s discussion of time. That is, the temporality that mediates difference and repetition is inspired to a great extent by Heidegger’s meditations on time from Being and Time onward, even though Deleuze prefers to cite authors such as Bergson and Nietzsche to push beyond Heidegger. Furthermore, Heidegger’s intuition of a new thinking of temporality is generated out of an engagement with early Christianity, in particular Paul. Heidegger’s insight into Pauline temporality eventually passes into Deleuze’s thought, though this is a somewhat speculative genealogy.

Deleuze’s thinking about time in Difference and Repetition becomes even more Pauline when read from the perspective of Giorgio Agamben’s The Time That Remains. Agamben provides a magisterial commentary on the first ten words of Paul’s Letter to the Romans, and he theorizes the basic structure of Paul’s messianic time. According to Agamben, messianic time is the time that time takes to end, which cannot be adequately represented, although it is always lived. Messianic time is the straining of time toward its end before it actually comes to an end. To understand messianic time, Agamben refers to the French linguist Gustave Guillaume and his concept of “operational time.” The very representation of time takes time, and Guillaume attempts to conceptualize this time that time takes to form a representation as “a time-image.” Agamben says that “Guillaume defines ‘operational time’ as the time the mind takes to realize a time-image.”³³ Agamben then defines messianic time as “the time that time takes to come to an end, or, more precisely, the time we take to bring to an end, to achieve our representation of time.”³⁴ The term “time-image,” although not used in Difference and Repetition, later becomes a central concept for Deleuze, especially in his Cinema books. At the same time, the idea that later acquires the name “time-image” is expressed in Difference and Repetition, that is, the third synthesis, the pure and empty form of time. If Agamben is correct about Paul, then Deleuzian time is profoundly Pauline, even though Agamben does not refer to Deleuze in The Time That Remains. Deleuze’s time is not explicitly Pauline, and in many importantly ways it is Freudian and Nietzschean; but, it is significantly Heideggerian as well as Pauline in Agamben’s terms. To draw out the messianic significance of Deleuze’s philosophy, I turn to his thinking of the event in The Logic of Sense.

An event is an affair of language, a production of sense, rather than simply the interaction of bodies. The event is already associated with sense, that is, with meaning or signification. In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze uses the occasion of Lewis Carroll’s work to articulate two series, one of sense, language, or surface and one of bodies, affect, or depth. In a proper sense, the event is associated with sense in the former series. Deleuze says, “we will not ask therefore what is the sense of the event: the event is sense itself.”³⁵ An event concerns the passage from body to language, but it is a surface effect, it takes place across a surface: “It is by following the border, by skirting the surface, that one passes from bodies to the incorporeal.”³⁶ Events take place along an edge and spread like crystals. Sense is generated by the becoming of the event as it spreads across a body, as we saw in chapter 6.

Between these two series runs a cut. In addition to Lewis Carroll’s writings, Deleuze privileges the Stoics in The Logic of Sense. He quotes Émile Bréhier, who says that the Stoics distinguished two planes of being, corporeal and incorporeal being. Bréhier writes, “when the scalpel cuts through the flesh, the first body produces upon the second not a new property but a new attribute, that of being cut.”³⁷ The attribute is an incorporeal quality that determines the corporeal being differently. The cut, or the distinction between body and attribute, explains the difference between body and sense. Sense concerns the attribution or orientation of corporeal being, which is a superficial determination that creates and communicates meaning. The cut is an example, that is, the difference between body and sense is not necessarily or literally a cut, but it is an invisible and imperceptible distinction.

Deleuze later associates the wound with a pure event. He ponders, “why is every event a kind of plague, war, wound or death?”³⁸ The wound of thinking that an event constitutes is related to death as the name for the pure and empty form of time that is the third synthesis in Difference and Repetition. The reason “event” is a more significant term than sense in The Logic of Sense is because even though Deleuze associates event completely with sense, it has the uncanny ability to connect to a body, to pass from the corporeal to the incorporeal plane by means of a spreading along an edge. And this passage directly concerns the third form of time, because the event in its relation to the pure and empty form of time generates sense and meaning on the surface plane of language. In a sense, the event is the dark precursor of sense, even though it can only be described as sense.

Sense is generated out of nothing, a void, or nonsense. Nothingness is not substantial or nihilistic, because it is directly productive, as discussed in the previous chapter in relation to law. According to Deleuze, “nonsense functions as the zero-point of thought, the aleatory point of desexualized energy or the punctual Instinct of death,” and the termination of sense in nonsense explains why sense is essentially paradoxical.³⁹ The paradox of the absurd at the limit of sense concerns an “extra-being” added to signification that relates it to being.⁴⁰ The becoming of this extra-being is an event that produces sense.

So what sense do we make of Paul? Not Paul in his time, but Paul’s significance for us now? Philosophically, Paul is important because he is the first philosopher of the Christ-event. At least, he is the first theologian, that is, thinker or theorist of the event. Paul’s letters take place along the surface of language and concern the production of sense. This is the production of the sense of Christianity, which is also the provision of a law, a new law of love.⁴¹ Paul argues that law institutes a reign of sin as consciousness of law-breaking: “Law intruded into this process to multiply law-breaking” (Romans 5:20). “But where sin was thus multiplied,” by our becoming consciousness of it, “grace immediately exceeded it” by Christ’s victory of life over sin and law as death (Romans 5:21). Paul’s interpretation of Christ is not simply a second-order reflection, but according to a Deleuzian logic, it is already inherently an event. We cannot get behind sense or the surface play of language to descend into the depths of pure body. Jesus as Christ is pure body as incarnation being, and the passion of Jesus is the passion of body as body. The event of Jesus’s passion does not make sense, and attempts to represent the sense of the passion directly produce grotesque and tragicomic effects, as the movie The Passion of the Christ shows.

As we shift from Jesus to Paul, we see a concomitant search for the historical Paul, an effort at the retrieval of the radical Paul from the clutches of orthodoxy, patriarchy, or worse.⁴² Paul now represents the sense of the passion of Christ, which cannot be located in Jesus. This is why Paul’s thought is an event. We cannot pass through Paul to get to Jesus; we can only access Jesus by his significance through Paul.

Now, the question for Paul, which determines the sense of Christianity as a whole, is how many events are there? One or two? Are crucifixion and resurrection one event or two distinct but sequential events? We can think of this situation in at least three different ways, if we consider St. Paul’s situation from the perspective of Deleuze. On the one hand, we could take the traditional view that they are one event, that is, two aspects of the same process. In this case, resurrection is an incredible reversal of crucifixion. One dies and is put to death as a criminal by the Empire, and this is natural and normal. But what is stunning is the claim that this person is raised from the dead, even though this claim is less unique in the ancient world. Two distinct moments of one event occur on the same plane of (supra) history and form the core of a salvation narrative that is then generalized or extended to all humans and all of history.

The problem with this scenario, as its implications unfold over time, is the time inserted between the crucifixion and the resurrection, which takes the form of a pure Sabbath, a dead Saturday. This pure and empty form of time in the Deleuzian sense, at the heart of the Christ event, dislocates the reverse repetition of the resurrection and renders it inoperable. In more Derridean language, différance lies at the center of Christianity, and the temporalization of the passion means that resurrection is already delayed or deferred because the passion takes time and takes place.⁴³ Once the resurrection is cut off from the crucifixion, the crucifixion takes the form of historical reality, and the resurrection is relegated to the realm of the fantastic imaginary. This interpretive process occurs during modernity, which is encapsulated synecdochically by higher biblical criticism, with its liberal and psychological conclusions about Christianity and religion in general. How, asks David Friedrich Strauss and many others, could this one man be raised from the dead and no others? What psychological effect must he have had upon his disciples for them to refuse to accept his death? Or else, what moment of mass psychosis must have struck to compel his followers, already stricken with grief, to convince themselves that their master has returned? One of the difficulties with this psychological reading, however, is its extension to Paul, whose dramatic experience comes much later and takes a very different form.

I want to suggest that the traditional reading is incredible, despite its appeal to many contemporary readers. We cannot pass back into the immediate situation of Paul, unmediated by two thousand years of history and thought. We cannot sustain the same belief in a literal resurrection; however, we modify its nature and significance to make sense according to our liberal and postliberal sensibilities. At the same time, however, the second reading is not Deleuzian enough. The pure and empty form of time that lies between the crucifixion and the resurrection does not concern chronos, a chronological order, but is a drop of time in its pure sense, what Deleuze in his Cinema books calls a “time-image.”⁴⁴ The time-image is a cut that relates crucifixion and resurrection not as a before and an after, but as the duality of The Logic of Sense. Deleuze argues that the event should not be “confused with its spatio-temporal realization in a state of affairs.”⁴⁵ Rather, the crucifixion concerns the body, the pure body and its absolute passion and its depths, while the resurrection is an event of sense because it refers to the signification of Christ’s body, its transfiguration along a surface. This is a paradox, but Deleuze has shown how the logic of sense is paradoxical because it is multidirectional: “good sense affirms that in all things there is a determinable sense or direction; but paradox is the affirmation of both senses or directions at the same time.”⁴⁶ Furthermore, the history of Christianity is nothing if not a series of paradoxes, and thus it could be said to demonstrate a logic of sense.

But specifically, in what way is the Christ-event a paradox? That is, how can death signify life? Recall that every event bears “a kind of plague, war, wound or death.”⁴⁷ Death is the kernel of every event, the death or passion of bodies in their becomings. According to Deleuze, willing the event is not resignation to the wounding of body, but “willing the event is, primarily, to release its eternal truth,” which means that ultimately “this will would reach the point at which war is waged against war, the wound would be the living trace and the scar of all wounds, and death turned on itself would be willed against all deaths.”⁴⁸ Deleuze appeals to Nietzsche’s formulation of Amor fati, to will and love what happens, which means not resignation to fate, but a transvaluation of it. “We are faced with a volitional intuition and a transmutation,” Deleuze writes. This transmutation involves affirming the event in a particular way to provide it a particular direction or orientation, which is the production of sense. Willing the event involves “a change of will,” which is “a sort of leaping in place (saut sur place) of the whole body which exchanges its organic will for a spiritual will.”⁴⁹ The spiritual will “wills now not exactly what occurs, but something in that which occurs, something yet to come which would be consistent with what occurs, in accordance with the laws of an obscure, humorous conformity: the Event.”⁵⁰ We can read this striking passage from The Logic of Sense as a commentary on the Christ-event and thereby read Deleuze as a contemporary St. Paul.

The passage from body as body that is expressed in the crucifixion to the sense or significance of the resurrection is the transmutation and the event. The proclamation of the resurrection is the result of an enormous spiritual will that transvalues the grotesque torture and death of a Jesus-body, hanging from a cross, to the good news that Christ is alive. The event makes sense in this paradoxical way. The resurrection is not a separate event, and it does not occur in “reality,” but it is the sense of the Christ-event. The term “event” here is crucial, and in some ways exceeds sense, because it overhangs sense and reaches down to the passion of bodies to incorporate the wound or death into sense. But, the event is never detached from signification. Using religious language, Deleuze calls the transmutation of what happens into an event an “immaculate conception”: “the event is not what occurs (an accident), it is rather inside what occurs, the purely expressed. It signals and awaits us.”⁵¹ Using Deleuze’s logic of sense, which is more profoundly a logic of the event, we can read the significance of the Christ-event in contemporary theoretical terms. The event occurs along the cut between the crucifixion of the resurrection that forms the pure and empty form of time. Furthermore, this reading is the result of a truly radical theology that is willing to take responsibility for the event and to risk the generation of sense, rather than accepting it ready-made from previous events of thinking.

From the standpoint of Agamben’s reading of Paul, the Christ-event is one event, and messianic time is the time that remains for the resurrection to be fully accomplished. Similarly, the dead Saturday expresses the operational time of the crucifixion, the representation of the time it takes for the crucifixion to take place, to come to an end. Of course, Paul expected the resurrection to come to an end much more quickly than two millennia, and Agamben is not that far from Badiou (although Badiou is much more critical and skeptical of language than Agamben) in his attempt to formalize a messianic structure of language out of Paul’s writings without wishing to adhere to Paul’s precise interpretation of a specific salvific-historical event. The difference between Agamben and Deleuze is that Agamben’s thought is more teleological, because messianic time is always defined by its end toward which it is straining to reach. For Deleuze, time is futural but not teleological in this way, which may mean that it is not strictly speaking messianic, at least as Agamben understands it. Agamben says that Derrida’s philosophy is not messianic, because for Derrida, “the trace is a suspended Aufhebung, that will never come to know its own plērōma. Deconstruction is a thwarted messianism, a suspension of the messianic.”⁵² On the one hand, we could say that Derrida’s thought is fully and overwhelmingly messianic precisely because it never reaches its end. On the other hand, this critique of Derrida would not simply apply to Deleuze, who does not use the term “trace” because of its negative connotations, and because he understands sense and event as purely productive processes. For Deleuze, the time-image is less directional, less chronological, and therefore less operational than it is for Agamben. If it is the straining toward an end that determines the messianic, then Deleuze’s philosophy is not messianic; but if one detaches the time-image from chronological movement and sees how it is productive of sense with an event, then one can understand Deleuze’s relation to Paul without the explicitly messianic relation, or to put it in Agamben’s terms, to understand the messianic in Deleuze as not messianic.⁵³ I will return to this discussion of messianicity in the next chapter to contrast messianicity with Catherine Malabou’s conception of plasticity.

In this context, we can also consider Paul as a saint for Deleuze, because he expresses the sense of the Christ-event, here elaborated in Deleuzian terms. Deleuze can be said to have three saints, Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson, although he also terms Spinoza the “Christ of the philosophers.”⁵⁴ Following Edith Wyschogrod’s lead in Saints and Postmodernism, we can read Paul as a postmodern saint, in this case a Deleuzian saint, even if we have to read against the grain of Deleuze’s intentions regarding St. Paul.⁵⁵ This reading would roll Paul’s thinking of the event forward into Spinoza’s ontological substance, and vice versa, folding Spinoza’s substance (Deus sive natura) back into Paul’s proclamation of the essential temporality of the event.

Of course, Deleuze does not consider Paul a saint, and he closely follows Nietzsche in his antipathy toward Paul, most explicitly in his essay “Nietzsche and Saint Paul, Lawrence and John of Patmos.” In this essay Deleuze accuses Paul of “inventing a new type of priest even more terrible than its predecessors,” because Paul relies on the doctrine of immortality to intensify guilt and sin to create “the doctrine of judgment.”⁵⁶ Deleuze opposes Paul to Nietzsche by implicitly affirming Nietzsche’s reading of Jesus as a Dostoyevskian idiot, a simple and innocent being who inadvertently lends himself to the creation of the most terrible persecution machine the world has ever seen. Paul would be the inventor of this machine, and his opposition to the Roman Empire combined with the image of the Apocalypse, the imminent return of Christ whose return is indefinitely deferred, “invents a completely new image of power: the system of Judgment.”⁵⁷ The Last Judgment is a program created to enslave the world in its image of vengeful power, to get back at the powers that be for their power, and it is the result of an enormous ressentiment.

Nietzsche’s interpretation of Christianity is a powerful critique. I would not argue that it is wrong; certainly Christianity has all of these elements, and it is and has been a brutal persecution machine, even if that aspect does not exhaust Christianity. I am suggesting, however, that Deleuze follows Nietzsche too faithfully in his interpretation of “the black Saint Paul.”⁵⁸ Contemporary historical and biblical scholarship has emphasized the radicality of St. Paul and his revolutionary significance that precedes the establishment of a Christian orthodoxy. The line, if there is one, between revolutionary and reactionary Christianity does not lie between Jesus and Paul, but falls after them. In addition, as Jacob Taubes suggests, we can better see Nietzsche as a rival to St. Paul in his attempt to offer European thought a new system of values, a viewpoint that corrects Deleuze’s oppositional reading. Taubes writes:

Nietzsche makes a strategic choice for atheism, and Deleuze follows his lead because he humanely opposes “the cruelty of the pang of conscience,” that “Christianity hypostasizes sacrifice rather than abolishing it, and thus perpetuates it.”⁶¹ We may or may not make the same choice, or we may not know exactly what it means to choose theism or atheism, Christ or Antichrist.⁶² But, we can read St. Paul in a way that avoids a forced choice and appreciates his profound importance because he generates the sense of what becomes Christianity for the event. Radical theology attends to the sense of the event without being caught within the either-or alternative expressed by the opposition of Paul and Nietzsche, whose contemporary form is expressed as Christianity or nihilism: tertium non datur.⁶³ Deleuze supplies a more supple, more paradoxical, and at its limits even a more theological thinking in The Logic of Sense and other books.

In our contemporary political situation, we have no simple positive alternative with which to oppose our contemporary capitalist empire. Historical understanding of early Christianity provides resources for contemporary radical political thought, because it sharpens the opposition between Christ’s kingdom and the Roman Empire that crucified him. The problem is that the Christ-event has largely run its course. Its sense has oriented Western and world history for two millennia, but we cannot simply cling to it nostalgically. To proclaim an old-fashioned, worn-out event in a desperate attempt to short-circuit global capitalism is what Deleuze would call a bad repetition, because it is based on a presumed identity. In fact, I will suggest in the next chapter, in relation to the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, that part of the contemporary significance of Christianity is to maintain the coherence and identity of the West.

We are in search of a new event to proclaim; we are fumbling around, trying to make sense of an event to-come. This event may or may not occur in the future; it is not simply a question of what will happen, but a futural possibility in the present, which is also the possibility of having a future. So long as we preserve this openness to the future, we have the possibility of an event. This approach is a Derridean variation on Heidegger’s Gelassenheit. Gelassenheit means letting-go or letting-be, and one option is to stop grasping or trying, to let go and await the event, which may or may not come. According to Derrida, the event is “unconditioned” and “unforeseeable,” and therefore always “to-come.”⁶⁴ According to Heidegger, “Only a god can save us,” which means that we cannot save ourselves. The best we can do is adopt an appropriately faithful attitude toward being. Even though Badiou attempts to formalize being in quasimathematical terms, he ends up close to Heidegger and Derrida in some ways, because he spells out the conditions for the possibility of an event based on his understanding of being, then prescribes a militant fidelity to the revolutionary event when and if it occurs.⁶⁵

What if an event does not occur? Are we completely passive in anticipation of its existence? The choices seem to be to proclaim an ancient and possibly irrelevant event, prophesy the hope for a future event, or proclaim the nothing, which is the nihilistic option. These alternatives presume that we no longer have faith in history or the inevitable progress of humanity and life. Hegelian and Marxist teleologies seem incredible or impossible.

If the Deleuzian alternative is credible, then we are forced back on sense and body. As Spinoza famously remarked, we still do not know what a body can do. According to Deleuze in Cinema 2, the current situation involves a crisis of belief in the world: “whether we are Christians or atheists, in our universal schizophrenia, we need reasons to believe in this world.”⁶⁶ The fabric that ties sense to body has become frayed and torn and needs to be reconstituted. As I suggested in chapter 3, our challenge is to stitch sense to body in order to create a new ethics that is anticapitalist in the wake of a theopolitical critique. The link between sense and body is an event; even though the event takes place from the side of sense, it reaches body to transfigure and express it. Paul functions as an example, an exemplary figure, and an inspiration, but at the same time merely an example and not a model to be repeated. America is not ancient Rome. For us, this is both better and worse.

Who has the vision to proclaim the event that is occurring at this moment, in its horrific brutality and its awesome opening to the infinite? This event can be named as the end of global capitalism, because capitalism is reaching real earthly limits of resources that make indefinite growth impossible. This event can be understood in material, physical, ecological, social, political, philosophical, and also theological terms. The task of radical theology is to think the event, which demands the theological vision of a new St. Paul. My contention is that Deleuze provides important theoretical resources to think the event, and therefore he is a contemporary successor to Paul. In the next chapter, I will suggest that a plastic understanding of the event is more useful than a messianic interpretation of the event.