the political resurrection of saint paul

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The Political Resurrection of Saint Paul

Matthew Bullimore

The Political Theology of Paul. By Jacob Taubes. Translated by Dana Hollander. Stanford,CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. Pp. xiv + 160.

As far as most theologians are concerned, Saint Paul has never really gone away.He has, of course, been reconsidered and appropriated for different ends on manyoccasions. But since Nietzsche’s tirades, the philosophers have let him be andseem to have gradually forgotten about him. Some recent philosophers, however,have noticed him lurking about on the edge of theology, looking a little frustratedand perhaps even just a trifle bored. Jacob Taubes was one of the first to do soand to realize that there is still a lot more that Paul wants to say.

Until his death in 1987, Jacob Taubes held the Chair in Hermeneutics at theFree University of Berlin. He also taught at Harvard and Columbia, which per-haps makes it surprising that this is the first work of his to be translated intoEnglish. One suspects that he is only now being translated in the wake of therecent Anglo-American interest in the works of Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben,and Slavoj Žižek, all of whom, after Taubes, have recently rediscovered SaintPaul for themselves. Indeed, Agamben’s The Time That Remains is dedicated toTaubes.

Upon opening the volume, one can immediately sense the difficulties thatthe translator must have faced in coherently setting out on paper the teachings ofa man who thought out loud. (The fact that Taubes was a Rabbi had more than alittle to do with this.) This edition presents a set of lectures that Taubes deliveredin Heidelberg shortly before his death, and all difficulties aside, it nobly managesto bear witness to the oral form of Taubes’ teaching. The lectures as a whole havean autobiographical and notably idiosyncratic tenor, and they document the lasttestament of a Jewish intellectual living in Germany during the second half of thelast century. Moreover, they offer at once an homage to and a stringent critique ofthe work of the Catholic jurist, Carl Schmitt, at whose urging Taubes producedthese lectures. Taubes’ engagement with Schmitt, it should be noted, was notwithout cost. For his dialogue with Schmitt, Taubes was repeatedly censured byother Jewish thinkers, which may explain why he waited until the eleventh hourto fulfill his promise to Schmitt.

174 MATTHEW BULLIMORE

In many ways, then, this is not an easy book. The style of the book followsfrom its highly charged and polemical content, and the argument is littered withasides, digressions, omissions, presumptions, as well as many witticisms and put-downs. Taubes’ theses are elusive, and his refusal to conclude sections can befrustrating. The editors’ afterword attempts a risky reconstruction of the argu-ment, which is necessary, welcome, and successful. (The present reviewer wasrelieved to read that one professor of Biblical Studies who had no problems withBadiou and Agamben found these lectures “bewildering.”) In addition to a pref-ace that situates the lectures in the context of Taubes’ advanced cancer (he spenta day in between the four lectures in intensive care), there are also two appendi-ces that aid the reader in reconstructing Taubes’ dialogue with Schmitt. The firstpresents Taubes’ own account of their relationship, and the second reproducestwo letters: the first, addressed to Armin Mohler, a right-wing “extremist” withwhom Taubes had studied, found its way into Schmitt’s hands; and the second,addressed to Schmitt himself, bore witness to a comedy of letters reminiscent ofthe fated missive in Poe’s The Purloined Letter (99–100).

For all the extra material, which takes up fully one-third of the book, the edi-tion as a whole does not miss the apocalyptic tone and urgency of Taubes’lectures. These lectures were, for Taubes, a final opportunity to put forward hisown “negative political theology,” as Schmitt had demanded that he must do—even as they nevertheless undermine the anti-semitic reading of Paul’s letter tothe Romans, which underpinned Schmitt’s work.

Reading these lectures, one comes to realize that Taubes does not provide aprogram for a negative political theology, which in its very negativity would dis-allow a political system. Instead, he outlines the contours of its powers of critiqueand describes the resources for and urgent necessity of partaking in negativepolitical theology as a present way of life. The medium for the presentation ofthis negative political theology is a new reading of Paul and a reflection upon thereception of Paul in the Western philosophical and political tradition—a traditionthat for Taubes is either explicitly or implicitly theological, whether it knows thisor not.

In Part I (“Paul and Moses: The Establishment of a New People of God”),Taubes begins by reading the epistle to the Romans as a political declaration ofwar on Caesar’s Empire. By analyzing the salutation and the introduction of theletter (Rom. 1:1–7), Taubes unearths a thoroughly political vision. Paul is a ser-vant of the Messiah, of the royal line of David, who is also the Son of God. Allthat is “imperatorial, kingly, imperial” about Christ is brought forth as a directchallenge to the Emperor in language that any thoughtful Roman citizen wouldsee as properly belonging to Caesar (14). As he teases out questions about legiti-mation, election, Jewish-Christian/Gentile-Christian relations, and the dialecticbetween the centralized Jerusalem church and the Diasporic Gentile church,

THE POLITICAL RESURRECTION OF SAINT PAUL 175

Taubes describes a Paul who is utterly Jewish—and for that reason alone, utterlypolitical. The messianic message of Paul is for Taubes a wholly Jewish message,a reading that he develops through a discussion of Sabbatianism as well as anaccount of the logic of Jewish Messianism.

Taubes argues that for Paul, law is “a compromise formula for the ImperiumRomanum.” There was at the time “a general Hellenistic aura, an apotheosis ofnomos” (23). Law could be seen as hypostasis, as the Universal. But Paul is nottaken in by this “great nomos liberalism. He is totally illiberal.” Taubes, too, has“yet to be taken in by a liberal.” What he recognizes in Paul is a transvaluation ofvalues: “It isn’t nomos but rather the one who was nailed to the cross by nomoswho is the Imperator!” (24). Paul’s new vision of the universal is mediatedthrough the particularity of this crucified king and so transvaluates the world’svalues. Paul does not simply oppose a nationalist and Zealot political theology ofthe Torah against the cosmopolitical Roman nomos. He “fundamentally negateslaw as a force of political order” and refuses all forms of sovereignty, be theyimperatorial or theocratic (“Afterword” 121). Paul’s universalism is thus deter-minate in that it is a universalism seen through this one, and yet it does not refuseany who wish to partake of the new people of God formed through faith in thisMessiah. All of Israel is to be saved, even as it is transfigured into a new peopleof God. And so Taubes reads Romans 8–11 again in order to find a logic of mes-sianic universalism that refuses any anti-semitic cast.

There follows a complex and inspired analysis and comparison of Romans8:31–9:5 and the Talmudic treatise Berakhot 32a, by way of Rosenzweig’s analy-sis of the liturgies of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Taubes arguespersuasively that Paul deploys a typology between himself and Moses. On SinaiMoses pleads with God for his people, who are at that very moment worshippingan idol, and he seeks God’s forgiveness for them, even if he must be made anath-ema for their sake. So Paul also pleads for his people according to the flesh, whomay provoke God’s wrath by not having faith in the Messiah, and he wishes to besimilarly accursed if it would ensure their inclusion in God’s newly revealedwork. Taubes offers here a phenomenology of Jewish experience as it regardsdivine forgiveness and wrath. The performative nature of the Yom Kippur liturgyis set alongside Romans 9 in order to show that Paul undergoes the same agoniesas Moses before God. However, where Moses succeeds in his pleas and bringsthe law, Paul presents a new understanding of the people of God and of the trans-valuation of law by virtue of their faith in the Messiah. The Torah no longerdetermines Israel, and in its place is an allegiance to and trust in God’s Messiah,who negates and yet transvaluates all law.

The pneumatic content of Paul’s thought in Romans 9–13 is then exploredwith reference to Spinoza and Hegel. Taubes sees Paul’s allegorical reading notas a “spiritualizing” that negates the material but, via Benjamin, as the perfor-


mance of a way of life in which the spiritual breaks through into the material.Allegoresis is put alongside typology as part of Paul’s textual strategy, and so thehistorical and horizontal (typological) is placed alongside the transcendent andvertical (allegorical). Paul’s transfiguration of the people of God by virtue oftheir faith in the Messiah (the vertical) is thus accomplished by and proventhrough reference to the law and to the prophets (the horizontal). The much dis-puted concept of “faith” (pistis) is shown to be as much a part of a Jewish logic asa Hellenistic one, for it is faith-in-the-Messiah, who by virtue of all human reck-oning (Roman and Jewish Law) cannot be the Messiah for he is the accursedupon the cross. This moves towards the crux of Taubes’ discussion with Schmitt.(“This is where an almost ninety-year-old man sat with someone who was a littleover fifty and spelled out 9–11” (51).) Paul writes: “As regards the Gospel they[the Jewish people] are enemies of God for your sake; but as regards electionthey are beloved, for the sake of their ancestors” (Rom. 11:28). If Schmitt’santagonistic conception of the political has at its root the distinction betweenfriend and enemy, and behind that a theological distinction between Christianfriend and Jewish enemy, then Taubes shows that for Paul the Jewish people areenemies who are nevertheless beloved, and so are to be grafted back into the rootby way of the witness to the Gentiles (the nations as light to the chosen people).By virtue of their beloved status, the messianic vision hopes for the inclusion ofall in “all (pas) Israel.” The new union that is the body of Christ is a life born outof pneuma and lived out in agape, a new radically democratic association of thesons of God.

In Part II (“Paul and Modernity: Transfigurations of the Messianic”), Taubesoutlines the reception of Paul in the Western tradition both by those who abusethe Pauline message and by those who recognize or rehearse the messianic poten-tial of his negative political theology. Here the argument is less clear than in thefirst section, as Taubes rapidly deploys various thinkers to make his points. Hebegins with Marcion’s anti-semitic and Gnostic reading of Paul, which he sees asa precursor to the type of Germanic Protestantism exemplified by Adolf von Har-nack. Knowledge of God is separated from consideration of the people of God,the corporeal community, and Paul’s Jewish messianic logic. Opposed to this“essentialized” Christianity, which has been deprived of Hellenistic and Jewishpolitical potential, are the “Zealots of the Absolute and of the Decision,” CarlSchmitt and Karl Barth. Alongside Walter Benjamin and Franz Rosenzweig,Barth and Schmitt reject the liberal consensus and any secular deliberative modelof political government in favour of a Kierkegaardian stress on the apocalypticimportance of the “decision”—a decision summed up in the decision, that forChrist or for Barabbas (68). Either one decides for the in-breaking of the Abso-lute into the world (i.e., a messianic faith) or one does not. The decision is all-important for it is the choice of the exception, the “miracle” (85). The exception


is that which opens law to that which comes from without and disturbs its appar-ently immanent security. Schmitt argues that “Sovereign is he who decides on thestate of exception” and that the law can not stand alone by virtue of its owninnate strength, buttressed by the power of an immanent human reason (64). Onlya voluntaristic divine legitimation, made manifest in this decision on the state ofthe exception, can legitimate a system of law. For Schmitt, the one who decideswhen the law can be suspended is the one who can preserve the state from theforces of anarchy. Those who ignore the exception leave the state susceptible torevolution from below. By contrast, Taubes introduces Benjamin’s “Pauline”conception of “nihilism as world politics,” in which one relates to the world in itsirredeemable nature in the mode of “as though not” (1 Cor. 7:29–31), for thepresent form of the world is passing away. Instead, one lives for the messianicbecause salvation cannot come by way of worldly sovereignty.

Finally, Taubes turns to Nietzsche and Freud. Nietzsche, of course, makes adecision—for atheism and not for Christ—but according to Taubes he fails tograsp the importance of the Pauline dialectic between guilt and atonement.Nietzsche is a humanist with a “humane impulse,” but he loses the sense that “inthe I there is a profound powerlessness” (87). For Paul, however, the cosmos andhumanity within it are guilty but justified by faith in the Messiah, whose deathmarks the redundancy of worldly sovereignty. The superman in immanence is setalongside the body of Christ in its openness to transcendence, where the latter ismore anti-modern in its acceptance that it has not and cannot pass beyond guiltand décadence by its own power. Like Freud, Nietzsche has a modern preoccupa-tion with a humanly achievable emancipation from guilt, however differentlyconceived (“Afterword” 136). Freud believes he can heal guilt—and here Taubesoffers a fascinating reading of Moses and Monotheism, where Freud identifieswith Paul and not with Moses. But Taubes’ insistence on “original sin as a nexusof guilt that encompasses human history” leads him to the more humble positionthat guilt, as recognized by law, can only be overcome through participation inthe body of Christ (“Afterword” 137). The apocalyptic openness to the transcen-dent, manifest in the decision for the Messiah, thus cuts across moderninterpretations of sovereignty. It also tells against Schmitt’s defense of totalitari-anism by bearing witness to a new covenantal community based on an order thatgoes beyond mere law.

Taubes’ reading of Paul is tantalizingly close to recent scholarly treatmentsof Paul (see Neil Elliott, N. T. Wright, Richard Horsley, Bruno Blumenfeld, Rob-ert Jowett, and Alain Gignac) that constitute a small but growing body of workexamining the political content and potential of Paul’s letters. When Paul’sRoman context is brought to the fore—in contrast to the one-sided depictions ofPaul the Pharisee or Paul the Hellenist—then the subversive political message ofPaul’s gospel becomes much more evident. Taubes’ reading is particularly neces-


sary because it shows that Paul’s political voice is inseparable from his Jewishvoice. While Taubes describes this resonance with a hermeneutist’s skill, his phe-nomenological-experiential approach appropriates the obviously polemicalfigure of Paul for the Jewish tradition.

This translation of The Political Theology of Paul is also important for anunderstanding and reappraisal of the works of other theorists who are now turn-ing to Paul. Taubes’ extended conversation with Schmitt opens up a new angle ofcritique on a thinker who has had considerable influence in contemporary politi-cal theory. While the Right has obviously had an interest in Schmitt, FrankfurtSchool theorists and even Benjamin on the Left have been moved by Schmitt’scritique of liberalism and parliamentarism. It is thus worth briefly fleshing outthe main differences between Taubes and Schmitt. While Schmitt sought to pre-serve the State against chaos by the totalitarian seizure of the moment ofexception, Taubes has no “spiritual investment in the world as it is” (103). Theapocalyptic moment for Taubes, on the contrary, maintains the “absolutely neces-sary” separation of the spiritual powers from the worldly powers (103). Negativepolitical theology undermines the worldly order and especially law as an all-encompassing ordering power. The worldly order is not seen as legitimated by anon-immanent category and so governed by a “representative” or imitative formof government (e.g., the “totalitarian concept” as derived from a voluntaristicform of theism: the representative political order is legitimated by a form ofdivine sovereignty). Instead, as the editors of this volume explain, sovereigntyfor Taubes is linked to a sociological consideration of the community: Taubes’theology is not “a theology of sovereignty” but a “theology of the community,”and this community can only be formed by the apocalyptic decision to have faithin a Messiah who breaks apart all hitherto known forms of universality and sov-ereignty (“Afterword” 140). The new community is thus not constituted, likeSchmitt’s, upon a fundamental political antagonism. Taubes’ reading of Paulinstead sees the new community as necessarily integrating both Gentiles andthose who as yet do not have messianic faith, i.e., the people of God on the tradi-tional understanding. Thus the community’s love of the enemy (outward love)and the love of the neighbor (inward love) redefine the political as an agapeiceconomy of gift exchange (witness Paul’s “collection” for the “poor” in Jerusa-lem (17)). If, for Paul, the love of God and the love of others is inseparable, it isnevertheless the love of the neighbor, in Romans 13, that is foregrounded. ForPaul, love is social, and the love of God is mediated through the new community,the “body in Christ” (“Afterword” 129–31). So while Schmitt is the “apocalypti-cist thinker of counter-revolution” (“Afterword” 142), the apocalyptic momentfor Taubes is truly revolutionary because it opens the world up to its transfigura-tion by the coming of the transcendent, which disrupts all human forms of


sovereignty. In this way Taubes’ Paul is far more Christian than Schmitt’s couldever be.

To have Taubes’ critique of Schmitt, even after the fact, opens once again thepossibility of new conversations between philosophers and theologians about thesubject of the political. Considering the reactions to and appropriations ofSchmitt’s analyses in much contemporary political theory and theology, the pub-lication of Taubes’ lectures is particularly timely.

The work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe on radical democracy(Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, The Democratic Paradox) uses Schmitt’sthought as a basis for understanding the operation of liberal democracy. Againstthe deliberative model of liberal democracy, which seeks to find a consensus bymeans of rational mediation (Habermas), their work utilizes a Derrideanapproach to highlight the constitutive antagonisms at the heart of liberal democ-racy. If liberalism is interested in the freedom and the rights of each individual,while the demos is interested in the opinion of the many, then a tension remainsbetween the two. Democracy can only succeed on the basis of this agonism (nolonger an ant-agonism, for democracy sublimates violence into votes, as it were),and there is no hope of a rational unanimous consensus that is not a totalitarian-ism. Schmitt’s concept of the political thus returns, but Laclau and Mouffedisavow Schmitt’s attempt to remove pluralism from the State, seeing it rather asconstitutive of a democracy that will not and cannot find its end in—even thoughit seeks to move towards—an impossible “eschatological” moment of consensus(Laclau). This agonistic economy has, of course, been challenged by thinkerssuch as Badiou and Žižek, who see it as merely commensurate with the eschatol-ogy of the capitalist economy. Enjoyment is forever deferred, and so the endlesscirculation and rearticulation of democracy puts it in a bad infinite, susceptible toan endless re-territorialization by the workings of Capital.

Like Laclau and Mouffe, Giorgio Agamben (State of Exception, The Timethat Remains) sees the genius in Schmitt’s understanding of the political. Andsimilarly again, Agamben accepts Schmitt’s analyses but not his conclusions. ForAgamben, the state of exception puts the lie to the liberal account of law’s ownimmanent foundation and the possibility of founding a consensus upon reason.But instead of accepting this fact and establishing a new account of democracybased upon constitutive agonism, Agamben hopes for a different form of com-munity to come. Agamben appropriates Paul’s Christ and yet, like Badiou,evacuates the content of the figure of Jesus in favor of drawing out a logic of themessianic. The messianic subject lives, after Benjamin and Taubes, “as thoughnot” in this world. A new living otherwise is possible in which the subject dispos-sesses all previous identities. However, unlike Badiou, Agamben does not posit anew universalism, for the messianic subject is the “use” and “vocation” of thesubject who still exists in the world that is passing away. The messianic subject


marks a split with and in all previously formed identities and forms of commu-nity. For Agamben, “Gospel” thus stands to “Law” as the “State of exception”stands to “Law”; but the apocalyptic effect of Gospel is not an unleashing ofSchmitt’s totalitarianism. Like Taubes, then, there is an agreement that the apoca-lyptic moment that Schmitt sees in the political actually splits open all previouslyknown conceptions of law, but not in order to found a totalitarian state (either inSchmittian fashion or by way of Badiou’s new universalism). Instead, it allowsone to live otherwise in a community of those who do likewise. Schmitt, thetotalitarian apologist, thus gives birth to a conception of necessary pluralitywithin the democratic state (Laclau and Mouffe) and to a thoroughgoing critiqueof the totalitarian possibilities inherent in the state of exception (Agamben).

Schmitt provided an apologia for a form of consensus founded and main-tained by totalitarianism. By contrast, Badiou (Saint Paul: The Foundation ofUniversalism) argues that a new consensus cannot be found within the orbit ofthe old state of being but only through fidelity to an Event that has a mutuallyconstituting relationship with the Subject faithful to that Event. For Badiou, Paulis an amenable example because he founds a new universalism free of all othercontingent identity markers (slave/free, male/female, Jew/Gentile) and offers aparadigm of a new subject and a new community. By contrast to Taubes’ inter-pretation, however, Badiou’s Paul remains susceptible to a charge of Marcionitenegation of past particularities. Paul’s faith in the Event, removed from itsRoman, Jewish, and Hellenistic context, offers a paradigm for revolutionarychange now devoid of content. Taubes, rather than immanentizing this momentof decision and the concept of fidelity, opens the subject up to the transcendentapocalyptically breaking through into the present order. Yet this reading does notnegate Paul’s particularity. True, Paul does offer a new form of community basedon consensus, a new form of universalism, but it is not predicated upon an anni-hilation of his particular circumstances. After all, Paul’s messianic logic is aJewish logic that is reacting against a particular but false Roman universalism.What is new, and particular, about the Pauline universalism is that while it breaksopen the law and reveals that it is not immanently sustained, it nonetheless trans-figures it by placing it within a supra-nomic transcendent economy of love,embodied in the ecclesial community.

Against the hierarchical and voluntarist conception of sovereignty inSchmitt, Taubes’ Paul presents a radically democratic consensus where each isequal by virtue of their sonship in Christ. Like Schmitt, Taubes puts forward apolitical theology, which “presumes the nonautarchy of the human being, theinsufficiency of human innate and acquired capacities, the impossibility of animmanent rational foundation of one’s way of life” (“Afterword” 140). Butinstead of founding sovereignty upon a model of divine fiat, Taubes founds itupon the model of a community that is aware of its own sinfulness. The consen-


sus is neither based upon the success of human reason (deliberative liberalism)nor grounded in the exercise of naked power (Schmitt); instead, it is organized,structured and made possible by the economy of love that faith in the Messiahcreates. In anti-modern fashion, the assertion of the guilt of humanity allows forthe possibility of redemption and atonement from without, which must neverthe-less be constantly liturgically enacted and performed. (“I would be inclined todevelop theology out of liturgics: perhaps this is a Catholic notion” (38).)Taubes’ reading of Paul thus provides a strongly ethical reading that emphasizesthe new life of the people of God as constituted by the worship of the One whoconfounds all human universalisms and who paradoxically manifests a law oflove beyond law: a messianic account of at-one-ment.

Taubes’ work, by virtue of its form and its content, leaves open many ques-tions, but it will significantly enlighten and enrich the current debates that haveso surprisingly rediscovered Paul as a present concern. Theologians, and espe-cially Christian theologians, will benefit from the phenomenological insights ofTaubes and from turning their attention to the urgent political message of Paul,now liberated from the constraints of historical-critical methodology. Goodphilosophical engagements with Paul, one might dare to hope, could reap freshecumenical and inter-religious understandings. This volume likewise adds to thecurrent philosophical debates about the nature of a different time, a messianictime, and about the nature of a different subjectivity, a messianic subject. Thefecundity of Paul as political thinker is seen anew through the lens of aphilosopher who understands that theology and philosophy are not tribaldepartments (4). Despite the modern segregation of apparently autonomous uni-versity departments, Taubes’ premodern and antimodern approach reveals, as didSchmitt’s in another way, the hidden theology behind modern (and now postmod-ern) accounts of the political. At the very least, the “metaphysics” thus unveiledcalls for the attention of political theorists.

The importance of Taubes’ account is that, following on Benjamin andBarth, it reintroduces the transcendent into these debates as indispensable wherethe immanent is revealed in its crisis (“Afterword” 135). In the context of thenew debate, the choice that Taubes thus makes possible is the one between Christand Barabbas. Against the secularizing and immanentizing tendency of contem-porary theory, the transcendent crossing of the political is here theorized andeven lived out. The apocalyptic formation of the new community allows for anontology of politics predicated upon a love that is not just love of the neighborbut also of the enemy. The equality of the members of the new community isfounded by a transcendent outside, and hence as equality in Christ(“Afterword” 135). As Taubes writes in a letter, “law is finally not the first andthe last after all, because there are ‘even’ between man and man relationships that‘exceed’, ‘transcend’ law—love, mercy, forgiveness (not at all ‘sentimentally’,


but ‘in reality’)” (110). For Taubes as for other contemporary theologians (JohnMilbank, Catherine Pickstock), the danger of a politics based upon the immanentis the danger of a nihilism that leads to one form of totalitarianism or another.Taubes maintains the difference between the inside and the outside, but the out-side is now seen as the radically other outside of the transcendent: “Without thisdistinction we are exposed to the thrones and powers that in a ‘monistic’ cosmosno longer know any Beyond. The boundary between spiritual and worldly maybe controversial and is always to be drawn anew (a never-ending task of politicaltheology), but should this separation cease, we will run out of (Occidental)breath” (112). What constitutes the life of the Pauline community, in Christianthought or in Taubes’ Jewish understanding, is that it receives itself from an out-side that is not a voluntaristic idol but a source of love beyond sovereignty,beyond the mere exercise of power for its own sake, beyond Reason alone, andfinally perhaps even beyond universality. So, as Taubes enjoins: “Begin anew tointerpret Paul!” (95).

the political resurrection of saint paul

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