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SAINT PAUL OF THEPHILOSOPHERSDONALD LOOSE a ba Tilburg Universityb The Radboud Foundation at the ErasmusUniversity , RotterdamPublished online: 26 Apr 2013.

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Bijdragen, International Journal in Philosophy and Theology 70(2009), 135-151. doi: 10.2143/BIJ.70.2.2037124 © 2009 by Bijdragen, International Journal in Philosophy and Theology. All rights reserved.

SAINT PAUL OF THE PHILOSOPHERS

AN INTRODUCTION TO RECENT INTERPRETATIONS

DONALD LOOSE

Time for Saint Paul

According to Giorgio Agamben we should by no means miss out on the secret rendezvous between our times and the writings of Paul. 1 There is no way around this rendezvous because the present time offers a contemporary kairos to a correct interpretation of Saint Paul and, reversely, because Paul offers a hermeneutic for the interpretation of the present time. Recent mostly political philosophical interpretations of the writings of Saint Paul refer to the central meaning of the author's experience and concept of time. The specific era in which the texts were conceived apparently illuminates what is going on in our own times. Why is it now time for Saint Paul? I can think of three reasons. The first reason appears to be of a political or perhaps a generally cultural nature. It is no coincidence that precisely political philosophy directs our attention back at Saint Paul at a point in history when certain forms of universalism and cultural supremacy are criticized and fundamentalistic identity claims lead to conflicts. Jean Birnbaum observes that politics, whenever it runs out of breath or has noth­ing more to offer, has to go back to square one and return to its original point of departure: Saint Paul. 2 These writings, with the largest readership of the European cultural identity and unceasing commentary, require a new contemporary inter­pretation. This means that we have to change the canon and reorient our reading in order to prevent misuse for ideological goals that are ultimately foreign to it. If Saint Paul was the first one in whose singularity the universality of Europe's identity took shape and if that occurred by means of a reinterpretation of his own,

1 G. Agamben, The Time That Remains. A Commentary on the Letters to the Romans (translated by P. Dailey), Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2005.

2 J. Birnbaum, 'Paul, Ia revolution en begayant', commentary of J.M. Rey, Paul ou les ambiguiMs, Paris, Ed. de l'Olivier, in: Le Monde des livres, 5-12-2008.

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136 Saint Paul of the Philosophers

to him Jewish cultural specific heritage; if he thereby managed to endure the aporia between universalism and specificity and was aware of a non-conforming rest, which he would perhaps create himself, then in today's Europe and world it is time for Saint Paul if only for that reason. Not merely as Europe's past, but as our very present today and as what presents itself to us today. It is remarkable in that context that the specific Jewish expectations for the Messiah still to come in contemporary philosophical interpretations are again correcting an all too easy ideology of the end of history, the unchallenged social cohesion, or any dogmatic or philosophical conceptual disregard for ambiguity in general. The second reason is therefore intrinsically philosophical. In particular Martin Heidegger's spectacular classes of 1920-21 about Saint Paul3 and the further development of phenomenology against a backdrop of the inevitable temporary nature of thought itself and of all its concepts have reoriented the philosophical conceptual vocabulary at the experience of temporality of contemporary think­ing and of all thinking. The hermeneutic rereading of whichever oeuvre not only connects the time of the reader with that of the author - and vice versa -but it also introduces the notion of the temporality of interpreting, of the time needed to understand the meaning of a specific event. It suggests an ever to be disclosed meaning [sense] as, at best, a sense of direction. The sense is thus no longer ftxed within the text, but presents itself in the event of the interpretation of the text, which itself is a contemporary elucidation of a meaning still to be carried out in time. This makes the attention shift from the content-sense toward the sense in its enactment in the present time. The revelation of the writings of Saint Paul is therefore for Heidegger as well as Agamben, Badiou4, or Zizek5

the event of an itself revealing sense rather than the fixed sense of a revelation. Also the project of the deconstruction of Christianity as dis-enclosure (declo­sian) of Jean-Luc Nancy is an explicit elaboration of this.6

3 M. Heidegger, Phiinomenologie des religiosen Lebens, Gesamtausgabe, vol 60, Frankfurt, V. Klos­termann, 1995, 67ff. (The Phenomenology of Religious Life,Translated by Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Ana Gosetti-Ferenci, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 2004); H.W. von Herr­mann, 'Faktische Lebenserfahnmg Wld urchristliche Religiositiit. Heideggers phlinomenologische Ausle­gWlg Paulinischer Briefe' in: N. Fischer- H. W. von Hemnann, Heidegger und die christliche Tradition, Hamburg, F. Meiner, 'lfXJT, pp. 21-32.

4 A. Badiou, Saint Paul. La Fondation de l'universalisme, Presses universitaires de France, Paris, 1997.

s S. Zi.Zek, The Ticklish Subject. The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, London, New York, Verso, 1999; The Puppet and the Dwarf The Perverse Core of Christianity, Cambridge/London, The MIT Press 2003.

6 J-L. Nancy, La Declosion. Deconstruction du Christianisme I, Paris, Galilee, 2005 (Dis-Enclo­sure. The Deconstruction of Christianity, Fordham University Press, New York, 2008). Cf. Bijdragen 69,2008, 3.

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Donald Loose 137

The third and fmal reason is that philosophy cannot continue to ignore its age-old relation to religion. Especially not these days when everyone is rather offhand about the return of religion - mainly a fundamentalist version for that matter - and when exactly philosophy rebels against a religious tum and the possible fading of the distinctive terminologies of theology and philosophy7

and when from a politicallaicist (Yves-Charles Zarka) and republican convic­tion (John Rawls, Jiirgen Habermas) infiltration of public space by religious discourse is watched with great suspicion. What is returning in political respect with the so-called return of religion? Perhaps religion never just returns but rather bears witness to the appeal of the coming in the recall of the uncom­pleted past. In their relation to Christianity philosophers frequently and wisely take refuge with Saint John8, the mystic who stayed outside the ecclesiastical and social organization. German idealism and more recently the phenomenologist Michel Henry show a pronounced preference for Saint John.9 Ever since the conversa­tion that did not find any hearing on the Areopague the philosopher avoids Paul. Indeed, Saint Paul isn't a philosopher, it's just that philosophy meddles with everything; also with what is foreign to it and that sometimes turns out to be less foreign than it looked at fust sight. This much is clear: something has brought about something in Paul, and he himself has brought about something in human relations. Saint Paul i~ politics as well. It is hermeneutics of the present time and of subjectivity. And even though Paul himself warned for the temptation to allow oneself to be deluded by philosophy (dia tes philosophias - Colossians 2,8), the philosopher inquires about the nature of that something nonetheless. What is it and what allows us to understand what it is? Against which back­ground or horizon can the Paulinic event appear for us? It is revelation, it is interpretation, it is conversion and change, it is kairos and moment, it is event in history, and it establishes an authentic link to the present time and temporality. The heritage as regards content is for many a deficit better to be refused. The herald of nihilism and the Antichrist's advocate, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the atheistic mystic Emile Cioran could not ignore Paul if only for that reason.10

7 D. Janicaud, Le Tournant Theologique de Ia Phenomenologie, Paris, Ed. de l'Eclat,1991 (Phe­nomenology and the Theological Turn. The French Debate, New York, Fordham University Press, 2001); La Phenomenologie Eclatee, Ed. de l'Eclat, Paris, 1998.

8 Stanislas Breton, 'Christianisme: Paul ou Jean?' in Esprit, 2003, 292, 66-78. 9 M. Henry, Incarnation. Une Philosophie de Ia Chair, Paris, Seuil, 2000. 1° F. Nietzsche, Morgenrothe, §68 and 71, Kritische Studienausgabe, Giorgio Colli- Mazzino

Montinari (Ed.), Miinchen, DTV, 1988, vol3, 64-69.; Der Antichrist §41 and 58, vol6, 214-217; 245-247. E. Cioran, 'Rages et Resignations' in La tentation d'exister, Paris, Gallimard, 1956, 180-186.

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138 Saint Paul of the Philosophers

Is he not the first Christian and the re-instatement of the priestly tyranny? The first theologian to silence the bewilderment or the openness of the expectation itself with a founding logos? The masking of an occurrence that is always still to occur? A story of connections and clan mentality? The colorful pal­ette of contemporary philosophical interpretation of Saint Paul - even if more benevolent in tone - hints at the fact that also this time everyone has his own, private agenda. According to Jean-Claude Miller11 "anyone who talks about universalism is greatly indebted to Paul, even if most do not know how and in what sense. Only few quote him and even then for purposes that are contrary to what he himself aimed at." A Maoist (Alain Badiou) and a Leninistic psy­choanalyst (Slavoj Zizek), a legal expert branded by fascism (Carl Schmitt), an anarchistic ideologist of anti.,imperialism (Giorgio Agamben), a Christian­philosopher (Paul Ricoeur), a Jewish philosopher-exegete (Jacob Taubes), and an originally catholic German thinker who is resignedly expecting the last god (Martin Heidegger) circle around a secret that ultimately cannot be defmed philosophically. Although the political-philosophical interpretation dominates in contemporary philosophy, I will start with a brief discussion of temporality since it is the all-determining key for the remaining interpretations.

1. Temporality and Interpretation

Heidegger has initiated this reading of temporality. All current philosophical interpretations of Saint Paul are indebted to him in that respect. Heidegger's interpretation of Paul's letter to the Thessalonians frames his broader con­viction that an adequate self-understanding of philosophy is rooted in self­understanding as such, which is based on facticallife experience. 12 Heidegger appears to largely dissociate himself from the concrete content sense - the Gehaltsinn - of that Paulinic revelation. He draws attention to the priority of its actualization and execution in actu- Vollzugsinn. He thereby inquires after the conditions for a possible openness thereto in time. In the course of our factical daily concerns the how of the experience tends to be replaced by the what of the experience, the content that has been passed down to us through the history of philosophy or thought in general. The apparently self-evident content that was handed down should, however, be deconstructed in order for

11 J.C. Miller, Le Juif de savoir, Paris, Grasset-Verdier, 2006. 12 Cf. B. Vedder, 'Heidegger's Explication of Religious Phenomena in the Letters of Saint Paul',

pp. 152-167 in this issue.

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Donald Loose 139

us to be able to recognize the factical life experience that it expresses. Our relationship to reality is, as it happens, never primarily an objective knowing but rather related to a world of experience. To regain this adequate relationship to a world he understands conceptual definitions as formal indications only. They do not represent a preconceived content but a methodological indicator for the phenomenological explanation of our experiences. They are provisional and open to change. Also in Agamben's book Saint Paul's view of time is discussed explicitly.13

The Messianic has always been proclaimed as the coming, and that remains also today what it has always been. The profession of Creed notwithstanding, it is, as for Walter Benjamin, Kafka, Blanchot, or Derrida alike, nothing other than the lasting profession of the coming times in the present: ho nun kairos is il tempo che resta, the time that remains in every present time. Thus the event is not the kerugmatic kairos of the present as such - as it is for Badiou - but the affirmation of the inevitable Messianic quality in every present, that is based on the time needed to represent our own age in the present. The time of the execution of the representation and that representation of the present cannot coincide. That constitutes the para ousia, the separation of the present time and its representation. The Greek Christos- the anointed- therefore still means the Messiah, the coming, until the Second Coming. The proclamation is that of the coming in each present, of the advent in every present time. The event is always advent, to come, avenir, avenement. Messianic time is the paradigm of every historical time. It is the time that presents itself as the time that we have left in the present as the actual possibility that is still open to us. As Ricoeur remarks14, the unique nature of the confession of the resurrection of Christ shifts to a structural indication of Messianity in Agamben. Also for Badiou the real dimension of being is a temporal and contingent event. It is the mere fact that it happens. 15 With regard to being as such, and its inexhaustible possibilities as a (mathematically understood) formal infinite set of sets, reality is always a temporal event that is a mere representation - a particular set- of being as such. There is always a surplus of being with regard to any particular set, and the event is the moment in which an existing set is

13 G. Agamben, The Time That Remains (cf. note 1) is an elaborate commentary to the first verse of Paul's Letter to the Romans. Cf. also the article of J. De Meyere 'The Care for the Present. Giorgio Agambens 's Actualisation of the Pauline Messianic Experience', pp. 168-184 in this issue.

14 P. Ricoeur, 'Paul ap(ltre. Proclamation et argumentation. Lectures recentes' in Esprit, 2003, m 292, 85-112: 86.

15 Cf. M. De Kesel, 'The time of Truth. Reflections on Alain Badiou's Reading of Saint Paul', pp. 207-235 in this issue.

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140 Saint Paul of the Philosophers

interrupted. What is unprecedented in Paul is the extraction of the truth from the communitarian grasp of a nation, a city, an empire, a territory, or a social class. But the truth is not based upon the content of the proclaimed but on the loyalty to the interrupting event in its singularity. The singularity of the event can be universal because truth is based entirely on the post-factum loyalty to the contingent and singular event. Also for Zizek the Paulinic truth is the event. It is the unconditional urgency of the present as well as the retrospective understanding that can only come afterwards. In Agamben time also manifests itself as typology and allegorization16 of the Messianic promise from the past. But here it concerns a reversal of the classi­cal reading direction: it is the reversal of the completed in the as yet uncom­pleted. The New Testament that, as typology and allegorization of the Old Testament, has been understood as anagogic sense of the eschaton is reversed towards the open ending of its annunciation. The completing New Testament now is testimony to the still uncompleted in the completed. The Paulinic katar­gein, the suspension of the importance of the present, is then above all - as in Heidegger - the supremacy of potentiality over actuality, the invalidation and suspension of the solidified present. Messianic time is no longer the end of time but the model of the uncompleted present of every time. The question when the Messiah will come is not a question about an objectively defmable point in time, but the eschatological time arrives, when we adequately relate to it. That is why also today it is time for Paul.

2. The Politics of the Universal and the Singular

Exactly the inadequacy of the present time with regard to its interpretation - or reversely the non-representable rest of the present in relation to the representa­tion thereof- has an unmistakable political meaning. For Nietzsche Saint Paul always also remained der Jude, der ewige Jude par excellence,l1 but in the sense of the one who secretly set fire to the imperium romanum that he hated. "Die christliche Rache an Rom. " 18 Christ and Anarchist: that is the same thing. "Nihilist und Christ das reimt sich, das reimt sich nicht bloj3 ... " 19 They are the same because their goal and their instinct are the same: disturbing the world order. Taubes, the Jewish exegete-philosopher, who confesses in Die politische

16 Cf. P. Ricoeur, a.c. 17 F. Nietzsche, Der Antichrist §58, o.c., 246. 18 F. Nietzsche, Morgenriithe §71, o.c., 69. 19 F. Nietzsche, Der Antichrist §58, o.c., 247.

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Theologie des Paulus that "Nietzsche was his best teacher concerning Paul"20,

not only explicitly takes up the Jewishness of Paul, but he points to the political nature of the message as well. He takes Paul to be a zealot. The letter to the Romans is a declaration of war on the emperor cult of Rome. He points out, in particular in his discussion with Carl Schmitt, the dialectics of the rejection of the Jews, the enemies of the Gospel, in favor of the heathens as a strategy to arouse their envy and thus save them as a privileged, chosen people after all. 21

For Taubes ultimately Saint Paul is the restoration of the true Jewish law. The letter to the Romans is a Midrash to the Torah. It is clearly subversive with regard to Roman heathendom in its reaffmnation of the essence of Judaism. But he emphasizes that Saint Paul, with the law of the love of neighbor- relativizing the dual command for that matter - also puts any political law or regime in per­spective, the eschatological perspective. It is useless to revolt politically, and it is even more futile to use Saint Paul to legitimize a political regime. Hence there is a Gnostic streak, a tendency to interiorize, in Paul. For Nietzsche such a distance stands for a betrayal of life, betrayal of all that offers a future to life here and now. But Taubes takes Paul rather as someone who initiates the Gnostic move as a politically relevant protest movement with unpolitical means by way of the power of negativity and the spiritual power that invalidates and delegitimizes all institutionalized politics. This is diametrically opposed to Carl Schmitt, who considered Paul the defender of the Roman universal public order. That is why it was impossible to keep Saint Paul outside the debate concern­ing the legitimacy of modernity. This debate focuses on the question of a possible legitimization of modernity without referring to religious categories. For Schmitt especially the legitimization of the political power of decision of modem states is a bottomless decisionism, without an absolute criterion con­cerning good and evil, concerning political ally and enemy. Politics rules the moment of the decision in a state of exception in which precisely the norms are under debate. Agamben will again take up this topic as all-determining in the contemporary political situation. For Blumenberg modernity rightly breaks with the religious, in particular Gnostic heritage of a politics of the kingdom of evil versus that of salvation.22 For Taubes, however, gnosis as the movement

20 J. Taubes, Die Politische Theologie des Paulus, Miinchen, Fink Verlag, 2003 (The Political Theology of Paul, tr. Dana Hollander, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2004).

21 J. Taubes, Gegenstrebige Fugung, Berlin, Merve Verlag, 1987; Cf. M. Terpstra, '"God's Love for his Enemies". Jacob Taubes' Conversation with Carl Schmitt on Paul', pp. 185-206, and the article of De Kesel and the criticism of Badiou, pp. 207-235 in this issue.

22 Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie. Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souveriinitiit, Berlin, Duncker & Humblot, 1922; Politische Theologie II. Die Legende von der Erledigung jeder Politischen

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142 Saint Paul of the Philosophers

of interiorization - the pneumatic life - is at the same time the ally of moder­nity, of the moralization of evil, hence of the remaining relevance of religion in society. That makes Saint Paul extremely up to date. On the one hand because of the experience of the disrepute and the withdrawal of the political as such, which is accompanied by an equally remarkable continuation of the political from private initiatives and singular ideals that still influence politics in an unpoliti­cal way. On the other hand does the Gnostic reserve as regards the political elicit a certain Paulinic prudence - the infamous hos me - in which one is in the world as if not. Therefore one can be loyal to his/her own particular religious tradition and personal motivation as well as the public order. All too exaggerated apocalyptic expectations concerning a future kingdom of salva­tion are refuted. This compromise makes for interesting reflections as to the remaining impact of religion on the public domain nowadays. The Paulinic withdrawal of religious beliefs from political ideology and the reserve con­cerning its all-determining role as universally legitimizing and uncontested discourse, but without totally distancing itself from the political as such out of private motivation, seems quite similar to the current meaning of religion in the public square. As Y. C. Zarka rightly argues, we have to avoid politicizing the theological (which he observes in Badiou and Zizek) as well as theologiz­ing politics (C. Schmitt). With good reason Zarka inquires whether Badiou's so called laicisation of the theological message of Saint Paul does not cause exactly the reverse: a politicizing of the theological. We do not need the mes­sage of Saint Paul to ground the universal character of truth by dissociating it from a specific community. Plato and Socrates pointed that out centuries ago. And no religion is founded in such an empty universal truth claim as to what Badiou reduces the message of Christianity. What is at stake here is "Saint Paul is to Christ what Lenin is to Marx. " 23 ZiZek is absolutely clear in his approval of the analysis of Badiou and not reading it as a laicisation but as Christian theology becoming politics in Marxism. The truth of Badiou's neutralizing the theological is a politicizing of the theological, just as Schmitt was a theologizing of the political. 24

Theologie, Berlin, Duncker & Humblot, 1970; H. Blumenberg, Die Legitimitiit der Neuzeit, Frankfurt a/M, Suhrkamp, 1966; Hans Blumenberg- Carl Schmitt Briefwechsel, Frankfurt a/Main, Suhrkamp, 2007; Jan-Werner Muller, A Dangerous Mind. Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought, Yale University Press, 2002.

23 A. Badiou, o.c., p. 2. 24 Y.C. Zarka, 'Le retour contemporain du theologico-politique: comment y resister?' in:

Ph. Capelle (ed.), Dieu et Ia cite. Le statut contemporain du theologico-politique, Paris, ed. du Cerf, 2008, 261-173.

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Donald Loose 143

Who actually was Paul? Jew or Roman, Greek of the global Hellenism of that time or sectarian Christian-Jew? For Stanislas Breton25 Paul is all of that. He is a true Jew from the tribe of Benjamin and schooled in its doctrine by Gamaliel, born in Tarsus, a renowned city where stoicism prospered, Roman citizen by birth and proud of it, apostle of Christ for both Jews and gentiles. Was he the first European and universal cosmopolite who believed in the rights of the human being as human being, not as man or woman, not as Greek or Jew, not as slave or free person? Is he that one, singular moment in which Europe was born as this specific heritage of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome - Rome above all, no matter how much Georges Steiner continues to ignore it?26 But his humanism has nothing of a doctrine concerning the dignity of the human being as human being because all these distinctions are irrelevant only because all are one in Christ, and only for that reason. A contrary event is at issue, one that will make or break all. This universalism is not an abstract feature, no matter how noble we consider it to be, but it is a concrete community, rooted in an outright singular event: for Jews a scandal, for Greeks a folly. Jew, Roman, Greek, or Christian: for Alain Badiou Paul is therefore none of the above. The point is that the singularity of this universality is anchored in a pure event (evenement) for which facticity can never be the explanation. Paul is the illustration of an evenement pur, that is a rupture which can neither subjec­tively nor objectively be grafted onto what is. The event of Paul is not grounded in something, it is grounding, absolute beginning. It cannot, precisely not, be understood from what Paul is - Jew, Greek, or Roman - nor from the content of his claims - Christ was resurrected - because that is an historical non event (for Badiou a myth). What matters is the event itself, what theologians have called the power of the kerugma all along, the performative (illocutionary) force of the Creed, not the locutionary propositional content. What Badiou has in common with Lyotard is the radical interruption by the event, but he has the appeal of the universal in mind, in which Lyotard no longer believes. Also Zirek rather views Paul as the act of the interruption, where the real can break through in the universal, symbolic codes. But for Zizek that does not mean that the real thus comes into view or that a new symbolic structure is established. The splitting of the symbolic is rather the opening towards the ontological gap: the real as the void. 27 For Alain Badiou - and perhaps also

25 Stanisals Breton, a.c. Esprit, 2003, nr. 292, 66-78. 26 For the essential role of Rome: R. Brague, Europe, Ia voie romaine, Criterion, Paris, 1993 and

G. Corm, La Question religieuse au XXIe siecle, La Decouverte, Paris, 2006, 12 and 54. 27 S. Zi!ek, The Ticklish Subject. The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, London/New York,

Verso, 1999; cf. the article of Henk Oosterling 'From Russia with Love', pp. 236-253 in this issue.

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144 Saint Paul of the Philosophers

for Heidegger - Saint Paul is therefore just about everything except Jew or Roman, and neither is he a Christian. For Badiou it presupposes a new type of discourse, neither philosophical nor prophetic. Ni - ni (neither- nor) is the ever returning mantra. And the event is an excellent indication that God is not a God of being either. Saint Paul is no theo-logian, just as in Heidegger; but criticism of onto-theo-logy. There is an incompatibility between philosophy and Christendom, and Paul is neither. He does not proclaim a universal reli­gious truth but the truth of the universal as such. Neither is he a philosopher since he does not refer to universal concepts but to an indisputably singu­lar event. Saint Paul is the anti-philosophical theoretician of the universal as such. But of course, all that one definitely is not or does not want to be, is exactly what one is, what one is obsessed by. Nietzsche's charge of the self-hate, the Jewish self-hate of Paul, might also be part of the heritage of his interpreters who want to liberate themselves of the testator in order to protect the cur­rent philosophicallaicity from the singularity of its source. The hatred in the name of the universal against any particularity, and more specifically that of Judaism, peeks round the comer in Badiou. Eric Marty28 has denounced these anti-Jewish polemics but has also stirred them up. Christianity without refer­ence to Judaism is heathendom, ZiZek warns. Taubes does not make a secret of the fact that he mistrusts all non-Jewish interpretations of Paul in this respect: Heidegger whom Jesuits taught how to read as well as Schmitt, the crown jurist of Nazi-Germany. He points out that Heidegger would rather efface the memory of the fust heir of the heritage, namely Christianity, in his philosophy. He does his utmost to undermine the Christian element in the philosophy of Kierkegaard - and Saint Augustine - in the analyses in question. This rejection of the all too particular own past is apparently part of Paul's heritage. Even though Taubes and Carl Schmitt decide for an inevitable historical particularity, it is nonetheless not the same particularity. Schmitt tends towards a Marcion­gnosis: an anti-Jewish, pure, and uncontaminated Christianity. Paul's attack on roman imperialism by a Jew in the diaspora, an anti-imperialistic zealot who turns the nomos of his world upside down with the unpolitical law of love, is clearly not the Paul of Carl Schmitt. The latter rather reads Saint Paul as a warning against speeding up the eschaton that all revolutionary universalisms appeal to. Nonetheless Schmitt also cites Disraeli in his Glossarium: "Chris­tianity is Judaism for the multitude, but still it is Judaism". Reversely Taubes recognizes Paul as a universalist, but he emphasizes that also this universalism

28 E. Marty, Une querelle avec Alain Badiou, philosophe, Paris, Gallimard, 2007.

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has to pass through the eye of the needle: the crucified. For Taubes, however, Saint Paul is a Judaism cleansed of Hellenism. The perfectly unmediated relation between singularity and universality seems problematic to me in every respect. The universal is never grafted unto the singular without mediation. Neither is that the case in Badiou. The universal­izing strategy is ultimately profiled as an active negation of differences, as tolerant indifference concerning all differences. The katargein (resisting) is a purposive and active rendering inoperative and de-activation of particular laws, the laws of the Greek, the Jew, the free person, the slave, etc. The inherent link between universality and exclusion in Paul's letter to the Romans is rather of the order of what Derrida calls the exclusion of the originary supplement. 29

Besides, an all too abstract universalism easily leads to the strategy of an exag­gerated ideology of Enlightenment that tears apart all pre-given communality. It not only intends the organization of society as one and undivided - nicely laicistic without cultural or religious difference and without headscarves - but for the ever loyal Maoist Badiou the red colored masses at the Tien an Men­square during the cultural revolution and the slogan "Long live the immortal ideology of Mao" are just as much an event as Paul's creed "Christ was resurrected". Ultimately even Badiou has more reserves when speaking of a cross-connection of differences (une traversee de differences) and even of newly arising differences, new particularities, as the form in which the uni­versal always presents itself. That already comes close to Giorgio Agamben's Messianic suspension and the inevitable re-instatement of a difference, a test, also when the universal is the aim. In// tempo che resta (The time that remains) Agamben rather continues the line of Taubes. He opens his seminar with a respectful reference to the latter's seminar in Heidelberg and his interpretation of Saint Paul as the representative of Jewish Messianism. Implicitly, but no less emphatically, Badiou's universal­ism is contradicted. Paul is no longer the founder of a new, universal religion, but the representative of the most demanding Jewish Messianism. As in Derrida it concerns an impossible and inconceivable universalism. Paul is no longer the inventor of universalism, but the one who surpasses the division of nations by a new subdivision and who is always left with a permanent rest in this process of dividing. There will always be a rest, not only because different subdivisions will always be possible, but also because the legitimizing representation of the division is always of a different order than the facts and their own time span demand in the present. Saint Paul is not concerned with the proclamation of a

29 Cf. M. De Kesel, a.c.

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new identity or a new calling, but with the revocation - the deconstruction - of any identity. Every identity must always recapture itself and always loses itself in time. The time that remains is not as much the time that we have left but the time that extends (ho kairos sunestalmenos). It is the time that is needed to understand the present time and to mediate between the time that is no longer valid and the time that has not yet come. 30 The present time is always excep­tional in that sense, as Carl Schmitt has already pointed out, because it is the time in which current and mostly abnormal decisions have to be taken. What is illegitimate in the normal situation becomes legitimate in the exceptional state and what is legitimate in the normal state can become illegitimate in the excep­tional state. Current politics suggests a integral identification of politics with the struggle for recognition of particular life-styles in civil society and derive its authority from the monopoly of that representative recognition.31 Nonetheless politics will always have to recognize a not entirely current representativity in this process, and it might be the specific task of politics to keep the awareness alive of the existence of a remnant and be the representativity of the non-rep­resented.32 According to Agamben, Paul's writings to Jews and non-Jews are a reminder of the fundamental impossibility of an integral political representation. They are the reminder of an unrepresentable residue of human existence as such. Are the Christians in spirit, but not in the flesh, the uncircumcised, non-Jews, or are they not non-Jews without being Jewish? Thus the hos me has above all the destabilizing effect of the awareness of the inadequacy of politics in light of the Messianic suspension. This does not concern an expected end of time but the ending of time, the time that is needed for the representation of the time being. Ricoeur- well-balanced, striving for synthesis, granting everyone his share of the truth as always - concludes that you should not let the universalizing strategy dominate the genealogical and the strictly autobiographical ones. The diversity of Paul's discourse should be respected.33 He even makes a plea for the aporia in this discourse: argument and event (in Heidegger's terms the content sense [ Gehaltsinn] or the propositional content and the enactment [Volzugsinn] or pragmatics) belong together.34 But also historicity and kairos,

30 Cf. J. De Meyere, a.c. 31 Cf. G. Agamben, State of Exception, (translated by K. Attel), Chicago, The University of

Chicago Press, 2005. 32 J. Ranciere, La Mesentente, Paris, Galilee, 1995. 33 For the contextualisation of Saint Paul's view of man in Jewish terminology and Graeco-roman

philosophy: G. H. van Kooten, Paul's Anthropology in context, Mohr Siebeck, 2008. 34 The distinction appears related to linguistic analysis. (the speech act theory of J. L. Austin and

John Searle): constatives (locutionary content), perfomatives (illocutionary force), and the perlocu­tionary effect on the hearer.

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universalism and singularity cannot be separated. Philosophy is concerned above all with enduring and clarifying this aporetic relationship. That implies a paradoxical relation to the time in the current time.

3. Philosophy and Religion

Paul's real message was for philosophers and in his own view a folly. The heart of that message - the resurrection of Christ - is an historical non-event in these philosophical interpretations, but it turns out to be an interpretation key for the present time nonetheless. It is at least remarkable that the enmity of those days is no longer an issue. Nietzsche asserts that Paul wanted to have the upper hand. In Morgenrothe he calls him the inventor of Christen­dom, an ambitious and arrogant prig, an offended dandy, obsessed by an idee flxe: his own inability to obey Jewish law as a Jew.35 Cioran, tortured all his life between depression and exaltation, dedicates one of his most venomous assaults in Rages et Resignation to Saint Paul. "Hot, sensuous, melancholic, and malignant as he was in his self-hate that he was unable to obey that law, even more, that he was stimulated to violate it time and again, he strove to escape the cross to which he was nailed. The revenge occurred to him, the epileptic, on his way to Damascus as a gift of God: the law is dead. The law leads to death. The law is death. From this death he rose, risen as the Resur­rected, in whose death on the cross the law had died. The diseased, suffering of tormented arrogance, is healed instantly. In the blink of an eye he becomes the happiest person on earth. He is the turning-point of history: the fate of Jews, even of all people." "He has turned Christianity into an unsavory religion in which the most objectionable traditions of the Old Testament - intolerance, violence, provincialism - have been restored. This cannot be held against him often enough. And what impertinence to interfere with things that are none of his business and of which he hasn't got a clue! " According to Cioran, "he pays less attention to the relationship between human being and God than to that between people among themselves, obsessed as he is by the city, both the city he wants to destroy as the city he wants to build .... Connections, family relations, clan mentality everywhere. " 36 That at least is the Paul of Cioran, because now it turns out that the wise of today - or at least those who are said to love wisdom - tum to Saint Paul and recognize themselves in the paradoxes of his time.

35 Nietzsche, Morgenrothe, o.c. §68, 66-68. 36 Cioran, o.c.

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148 Saint Paul of the Philosophers

Oppositions are the mainstay of Saint Paul: law and love, work and grace, death and resurrection, sarx and pneuma. This is not the Platonic dualism of body and spirit. Sarx is- as law and death- an all-determining lifestyle or a way of life. Appropriation and constrained identity instead of openness and susceptibility. Law and death are opposed to love, to grace, and to resurrec­tion. But they are not external; they break into the opposite. The dialectic of these opposites appears inevitable. 37 Sarx knows its own imperfection all too well, but that is not sufficient to rid itself of it. Pneuma is the alternative that presents itself from the inside, but should you believe this? Some will call this the ancient contrast between autonomous philosophy and faith. That turns out to be too simplistic because when we only emphasize this contrast, we miss out on something on both sides. It is rather faith that seeks understand­ing -fides quaerens intellectum - and understanding that yearns for openness of faith - intellectus quaerens fidem. However, if we wish to reconcile them completely, we still have a residue, a contemporary remnant that remains and disturbs in this conflict. Searching (quaerens) has to be maintained in both perspectives. We should not return to Saint Paul today in post-modem times because precisely his diversity allows everyone to discover his own Saint Paul as the projection of his own convictions. Saint Paul should remind anyone of the wrongness of getting stuck in false identities. Philosophy and religion can be allies as a process of opening up. ZiZek rightly speaks of "a return ticket law -love". 39 From law to love and back. Love presents itself beyond the law, but without the law love makes no sense. And perhaps today there is a similar return trip religion -philosophy. Hans Blu­menberg has defined this dilemma of all theologies concerning Saint Paul's letter to the Romans we11.40 Christ is the new Adam who liberates from the paradox of an always already broken law that is not feasible. The paradox of paradise lost is that Adam had to have eaten from the tree of knowledge of good and evil in order to understand that this was an evil thing to do, that he had sinned. And this is also the dilemma of the Pharisee who is abiding by the law: understanding that this is the true law only comes afterwards [Nachtriiglich], after breaking it, while trans­gressing. If one cannot break the law, one cannot understand its meaning, and one cannot understand it as the true law. That is why the Pharisee cannot love the law. He will start to hate the law. However, Blumenberg adds that this dilemma

37 Cf. Henk Oosterling, a.c. 39 S. Zirek, The Puppet and the Dwarf. The Perverse Core of Christianity, Cambridge/London,

The MIT Press 2003. 40 H. Blumenberg, 'Das Dilemma aller Romerbrieftheologien' in: Hans Blumenberg- Carl Schmitt

Briefwechsel, Frankfurt a/Main, Suhrkamp, 2007, 243-246.

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only repeats itself with respect to faith, which nonetheless only attempted to offer a way out of the impasse. If one wants to know that one believes and what one believes, one stops believing. One does not believe if one is not willing to believe that it is belief that matters most. Also Zizek points out in The Ticklish Subject that "we learn the truth only -if ever- when it is already too late." Saint Augustine is the great echo of the Nachtriiglichkeit of Christian truth: too late I have loved God. Too late and afterwards one understands the truth about life. What one then understands is that ultimately one does not understand. That is the essence of Saint Augustine's insight in the truth. One cannot defme truth oneself, in the end one realizes that one always already stood in the truth and was determined by it without realizing it. Now we see in a mirror, darkly; but then face to face. That means "then shall I know fully as also I was fully known" (1 Cor 13). Active knowing recognizes itself in passive being known and vice versa. Saint Paul's obedience of the law becomes faith, hope, love. In Zizek's thinking there is no room for the turning-point into mutuality. Beyond the law is not love but the abyss of nothingness. The dangerous utopia of love is ultimately nothing other than the radical confrontation with one's own imperfection, which can always be exceeded. The dialectic relation to the law not only continually gives rise to a necessary transgression in a phantas­matic supplement that explains itself away (doing the dirty but necessary thing or doing evil with reference to the law), it can absolutize the respect for the law in a Kantian way and sacrifice all reality for the sake of the law.41 Therefore Christianity does not blame Judaism for its great attachment to the law,· but for its lack of love for the law. It has a wrong relation to the law. Christianity is the alerting that the imperfect is the true form of the perfect - the crucified Son of Man is God, the fmite is true infmity at the same time, incarnation is kenosis, the key is agape. But that is not the road that Zizek takes. He agrees that the core of the Christian uncoupling - the unplugging of agape - is not so much the suspending of the explicit laws but rather of their implicit spectral obscene supplement. Ultimately one has never loved enough. But Christian­ity teaches, according to Zizek, that the one who really loves bears witness to one's fidelity to the (real) Thing by sacrificing (also) the Thing itself. The subject of agape ultimately stares into nothingness, Zizek asserts. Here the already mentioned politicizing of theology culminates in its most threatening excess: revolutionary terror masked by a vocabulary of love and virtue.42

41 S. Zirek, The Fragile Absolute. Or Why is the Christian Legacy worth fighting for?, London, Verso, 2000.

42 Y. C. Zarka, a.c., 269.

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150 Saint Paul of the Philosophers

Conclusion

It is the philosopher's task to avoid the temptation to provide premature answers, according to Heidegger. The formal indication renounces the last understanding that can only be given in genuine religious experience. With regard to the reli­gious content itself, the philosophical approach remains neutral and therefore the formal indications are repeatable for us without actualizing the act of faith.43

It thus appears that this perspective is necessary to understand Christianity, but that the content of Christianity is not needed for the enactment. Moreover, I'd like to add that it should not be used for political enactment. Derrida con­trasted and related the opposite and intertwined relationship of a deconstructive and phenomenological reading of religion in The Gift of Death. In a back and forth dialogical interpretation of Heidegger and the Prague phenomenologist Jan Patocka with regard to Christendom, Derrida notes that "the Heideggerian thinking often consists, notably in Sein und Zeit in repeating on an ontological level Christian themes and texts that have been 'de-Christianized'. Such themes and texts are then presented as ontic, anthropological, or contrived attempts that come to a sudden halt on the way to an ontological recovery of their own originary possibility .... Patocka makes an inverse yet symmetrical gesture, which therefore amounts to the same thing. He reontologizes the historical themes of Christianity and attributes to revelation . . . the ontological content that Heidegger attempts to remove from it. "44 Derrida affirms this back and forth as inevitable, and also Jean-Luc Nancy seems to move within this area of tension: a dis-enclosure of both Christianity and philosophy. According to Heidegger, we must understand the message of the coming of Christ as a thief in the night, definitely not controllable or predictable, but as intellectually not representable, as relevant to the uncertainty of our own life. Vedder comments, "if the perspective of content is given up, the 'empty con­tent' can indicate the way in which Christians live their lives. What is coming is not an expected moment in the future, but an 'empty' moment". Heidegger is indeed not concerned with the faith of the Thessalonians and certainly not with the content of their faith. He is interested in the experience of historicity. But Vedder rightly poses the question "whether this experience of historicity is possible without the specific content of Christian faith." Cioran could only warn against the message of Saint Paul, "In Athens our apostle was received badly. His fabrications did not go down well. That was

43 B. Vedder, a.c. 44 J. Derrida, Donner Ia Mort, Paris, Galilee, 1999, 41-42 (The Gift of Death, Stanford, Stanford

University Press, Stanford, 1995, 29-30).

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because there one was still in the habit of debating. Skepticism had earned itself a position that was not to be given up for quite some time. Athens cut short the Christian nonsense, unlike the wayward Corinth that could be won over. The plebs wants to be knocked senseless with words of miracle and vio­lence. It loves bigmouths. Paul was one of these: the most impassioned, the most gifted, the most cunning of Antiquity. . .. The wise of that time recom­mended silence, resignation, and surrender, all impractical advice. Paul was shrewder and offered tempting remedies that promised salvation to the scum and scared the living daylights out of civilized people." Apparently now it is time again for another Saint Paul in philosophy. The interpretations that were presented here mainly phrase paradoxes, ways of thinking that certainly do not converge. Perhaps Saint Paul is too big for sim­plicity. How singular or universal is Paul? How does his own past return in his present as the future of that present? How dogmatic or how disturbing is Saint Paul? How does freedom relate to the law, and how does this discourse relate to Western philosophy, the longing for true wisdom, at all? How does it relate to onto-theology, to a philosophy of religion and theology? And how do the mainly political rereadings presented here relate to what Paul had in mind? What Jean-Luc Marion observes about Saint Augustine- that it is nei­ther theology nor philosophy in the contemporary meaning of the word and that he ignores the distinction in a superior ignorance45 - might apply even more so to Saint Paul. Perhaps a theological conceptualization of Saint Paul therefore has the same limitations. Taubes calls Karl Barth the articulation of the total disillusion in this respect. If God is God, something has to take place from beyond. Only then we will realize that something has put an end to our blindness. Contemporary philosophy at least indicates in contemporary terms the direction of a possible dis-enclosure of its own self-blinding.

Donald Loose is assistant professor philosophy at Tilburg University and professor of the chair of the Radboud Foundation at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. His research explores Kant and the German Enlightenment as the turning point of modernity. It analyzes the divergences and continuities between pre-modem and modem understandings of moral obligation, the consti­tutional state, the theologico-political problem and the (post-) modem interpretation of religion. French 20th-century political philosophy is dealt with as a continuation and re-interpretation of the aforementioned basic Enlightenment categories. He published on Kant, the political philo­sophy of Claude Lefort and religion in the public domain. Address: Faculteit Geesteswetenschappen D 134, Postbus 90153, 5000 LE Tilburg.

45 J.L. Marion, Au lieu de soi. L'approche de Saint Augustin, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 2008,27.

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