Abstract
Žižek’s overtly political use of Paul results in an image of Paul as a figure of rupture. Žižek’s political radicalism is expressed through the voice of the apostle, a voice that is produced in the philosopher’s various interventions in contemporary debates by invoking the words of Gal 3:28. Žižek consistently uses this Pauline passage to justify his privileging of class struggle over what the philosopher dismiss as identity politics in the form of feminism and multiculturalism. By exploring the potential feminist and particularly multiculturalist aspects of Paul’s epistles, Žižek’s use of Paul is confronted and further anchored in Nancy Fraser’s political philosophy.
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- 1.
As said earlier, although Žižek claims not to be interested in what Paul meant, but what Paul means, he nonetheless refers back to historical realities of the past, like the Roman Empire.
- 2.
This Empire is construed by Žižek with a reference to Negri and Hardt. See note 2 in Žižek, On Belief, 5. Negri and Hardt’s conception of the present-day Empire is, however, informed by historical images of the Roman Empire, in assertions such as this: “Every juridical system is in some way a crystallization of a specific set of values, because ethics is part of the materiality of every juridical foundation, but Empire—and in particular the Roman tradition of imperial right—is peculiar in that it pushes the coincidence and universality of the ethical and the juridical to the extreme: in Empire there is peace, in Empire there is the guarantee of justice for all peoples”. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 10. In Žižek’s positive evaluations of this work, one can perceive a specific political struggle that has informed Žižek’s reflections: “What makes Empire and Multitude such a refreshing reading is that we are dealing with books which refer to and function as the moment of theoretical reflection of—one is almost tempted to say: are embedded in—an actual global movement of anti-capitalist resistance: one can sense, behind the written lines, the smells and sounds of Seattle, Genoa and Zapatistas”. Žižek, The Parallax View, 261. Žižek, however, has not only been appreciative of Negri and Hardt’s analyses of this Empire. This criticism has been directed against their analysis of our days’ capitalism, and not against their historical parallels to the Roman Empire.
- 3.
While Žižek presents multiculturalism as one ideology in nearly monolithic terms, I prefer to speak of multiculturalist ideologies in plural terms. Žižek appears to criticize the multiculturalist ideology that is also being criticized by major European politicians, such as Cameron and Merkel, in the “simple” and often “unreal” understanding of it as described by Charles Taylor: “It meant on this view limitless acceptance of different forms of life, which could allow at the limit the evolution of a society with self-contained ghettos”. Charles Taylor, “Foreword. What Is Secularism?”, in Secularism, Religion and Multicultural Citizenship, ed. Geoffrey Brahm Levey and Tariq Modood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), xiii.
- 4.
Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, 9.
- 5.
Caputo and Alcoff, 177.
- 6.
The image of the unambiguously emancipatory message of Gal 3:28 and the ambiguous role with regard to gender roles was introduced by Wayne Meeks: “Paul accepts and even insists upon the equality of the role of man and woman in this community which is formed already by the Spirit that belongs to the end of the days… The second generation of the Pauline school was not prepared to continue the equivalence of role accorded to women in the earlier mission. Perhaps Paul himself set in motion the conservative reaction”. Wayne A. Meeks, “The Image of the Androgyne: Some Uses of a Symbol in Earliest Christianity”, History of Religions 13, no. 3 (1974): 208. Hans Dieter Betz builds on Meeks’ readings when he comments upon Gal 3:28: “There can be no doubt that Paul’s statements have social and political implications of even a revolutionary dimension”. Hans Dieter Betz, Galatians: A Commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Churches in Galatia (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979), 190. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza expands on Meeks’ hypotheses when she writes that “Paul’s interpretation and adaptation of the baptismal formula unequivocally affirm equality and charismatic giftedness of men and women in Christian community”. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 1983), 213. In Schüssler Fiorenza’s view, the passage does not only express an egalitarian vision with regard to gender roles, but also with regard to ethnic or cultural divisions and the ancient institution of slavery. It “not only advocates the abolition of religious-cultural divisions, and the domination and exploitation wrought by institutional slavery but also of domination based on sexual divisions”. Ibid., 235. This egalitarian reading of Gal 3:28 with regard to gender is criticized by scholars such as Lone Fatum: “So in Gal 3,28c there is no indication of Paul having once and for all established the absolute eschatological ideal respecting women’s free and equal lives in Christ”. Lone Fatum, “Image of God and Glory of Man: Women in the Pauline Congregations,” in Image of God and Gender Models in Judaeo-Christian Tradition, ed. Kari Elisabeth Børresen (Oslo: Solum Forlag, 1991), 84. Karin Neutel also criticizes the egalitarian reading of Gal 3:28 by comparing its vision with ancient utopian ideas expressed by thinkers such as Plato and Philo. In her view, the eschatological vision in Gal 3:28 cannot be “saved” for expressing egalitarian ideas by being posited as pre-Pauline. Neutel thinks it is more plausible that the origin of the phrase is Paul himself (as Meeks had opened up for as a possibility in his pioneer study). With regard to the male and female, Neutel reads it in Gal 3:28 as a utopian male-centered vision about the end of marriage and not about the social or ecclesial equality of men and women. Karin B. Neutel, A Cosmopolitan Ideal: Paul’s Declaration ‘Neither Jew nor Greek, Neither Slave nor Free, nor Male and Female’ in the Context of First-Century Thought (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 222. In this way she lends more strength to Fatum’s reading, but also argues along the lines of Jorunn Økland: “I think that Paul was not in a position where he could choose to leave behind the fundamentals of the patriarchal discourse of which he formed part”. Økland, Women in Their Place, 234.
- 7.
In the words of Brigitte Kahl, it has been read by feminists and liberationists as “a lovely lonely alien unhappily trapped in the hostile matter of a Pauline letter”. Brigitte Kahl, “No Longer Male: Masculinity Struggles Behind Galatians 3.28?”, Journal for the Study of the New Testament 23, no. 79 (2001): 37.
- 8.
This text has such a remarkable afterlife that it led the biblical scholar Hugh Pyper to compare its “success” to the meme in Richard Dawkins’ neo-Darwinian sense. Hugh Pyper, “The Triumph of the Lamb: Psalm 23 and Textual Fitness,” Biblical Interpretation 9, no. 4 (2001).
- 9.
Breed, 140.
- 10.
J. Louis Martyn’s designation of the letter as “the Galatian embarrassment” is another name for these disruptive forces. J. Louis Martyn, Theological Issues in the Letters of Paul (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), 111.
- 11.
For instance, in John Chrysostom’s rivalry against Jews in Antioch. Riches, 19–22.
- 12.
John M. G. Barclay, “Paul and the Philosophers: Alain Badiou and the Event,” New Blackfriars 91, no. 1032 (2010): 176.
- 13.
Ibid.
- 14.
Ibid.
- 15.
Ibid., 178.
- 16.
First, Barclay will criticize Badiou’s “lack of clarity” between the site of the event and the event itself in his philosophy. Second, Barclay disagrees with Badiou’s interpretation of “the Jew” as “a cipher for some generalized cultural or theological stance”. And third, Barclay sides with Larry Welborn against Badiou’s one-sided emphasis on Christ’s resurrection in his description of Paul’s Christ-Event and ignoration of the crucial role the cross plays for Paul’s theology. Ibid., 181–82. “Badiou’s most significant failure to understand Paul occurs at this point.” Welborn, “The Culture of Crucifixion”, 139.
- 17.
Barclay.
- 18.
As Sanders famously concludes in his influential study, which perhaps more than any other scholarly work within New Testament studies, proved to be effective against unfounded stereotypes of Second Temple Judaism: “In short, this is what Paul finds wrong with Judaism: it is not Christianity”. Sanders, 552.
- 19.
As Barclay elsewhere affirms polemically, once again against Sanders: “Sanders is right that there is grace everywhere in Judaism, including the Judaism contemporary with Paul. But grace is not everywhere the same… Sanders’ common structure of ‘covenantal nomism’ is over simplistic; it masks the fact that the grace or mercy of God was a matter of debate among Jews and capable of many things of nuance”. John M. G. Barclay, “Pure Grace?,” Studia Theologica - Nordic Journal of Theology 68, no. 1 (2014): 9.
- 20.
“Paul and the Philosophers: Alain Badiou and the Event,” 179.
- 21.
Ibid., 180.
- 22.
Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, 104–06. As demonstrated below, Barclay does, however, discuss this question of Paul’s universalism and cultural differences in relation to another thinker: Daniel Boyarin.
- 23.
Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, 130.
- 24.
The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, 272.
- 25.
“‘Messianic time’ ultimately stands for the intrusion of subjectivity irreducible to the ‘objective’ historical process, which means that things can take a messianic turn, time can become ‘dense,’ at any moment.” The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, 134.
- 26.
Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, 119.
- 27.
Ibid., 118.
- 28.
Living in the End Times, 154. The same passage is pasted into “The Jew Is within You, but You, You Are in the Jew,” in What Does a Jew Want? On Binationalism and Other Specters, ed. Udi Aloni (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 172.
- 29.
This particular use of Romans 7 is from 2010, but the interdependence and underlying similarity between liberalism and fundamentalism goes at least back to Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology, 223–25.
- 30.
How to Read Lacan, 117.
- 31.
Scholars have good reasons to describe as well as to criticize Žižek’s decisionism: Erik Michael Vogt, “Schmittian Traces in Zizek’s Political Theology (and Some Derridean Specters)”, Diacritics 36, no. 1 (2007). Svenungsson.
- 32.
Barclay, “Paul and the Philosophers: Alain Badiou and the Event,” 178.
- 33.
Badiou does not anchor his atheism in Hegel.
- 34.
This de-theologizing of Paul is one of Barclay’s main critiques of Badiou: without the transcendent source for the value of the event, “it is not clear whence to derive the values that define” the benefits of an event. Barclay, “Paul and the Philosophers: Alain Badiou and the Event,” 181.
- 35.
Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, 159.
- 36.
The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, 136.
- 37.
On the other hand, it is also possible with Žižek, to imagine these Paulinists to be in a hurry to act, but by doing nothing in the mode of Melville’s figure Bartleby. Although Žižek never invokes Paul for conceptualizing or founding his version of “Bartleby politics”, the philosopher regards it as one of three valid political options: “How are we to choose between the three main options: (1) the “Bartleby politics” of doing nothing; (2) preparing for a radical violent Act, a total revolutionary upheaval; (3) engaging in local pragmatic interventions?” Living in the End Times, 398.
- 38.
This decisionism does also result from Žižek’s confusing of two distinctive theological terms: grace and love. As Roland Boer has pointed out, the two terms are often replaced by one another and this creates confusion in Žižek’s de-theologized Paulinism. Boer, 359.
- 39.
Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, 137.
- 40.
Ibid., 136.
- 41.
The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, 154–55.
- 42.
“While, of course, one should resist the easy temptation to elevate and idealize the slum dwellers into a new revolutionary class, one should nonetheless, in Badiou’s terms, perceive slums as one of the few authentic ‘evental sites’ in today’s society—the slum-dwellers are literally a collection of those who are the ‘part of no part,’ the ‘surnumerary’ element of society, excluded from the benefits of citizenship, the uprooted and dispossessed, those who effectively ‘have nothing to lose but their chains.’ It is effectively surprising how many features of slum dwellers fit the good old Marxist determination of the proletarian revolutionary subject: they are ‘free’ in the double meaning of the word even more than the classic proletariat (‘freed’ from all substantial ties, dwelling in a free space, outside the police regulations of the state); and they are a large collective, forcibly thrown together, ‘thrown’ into a situation where they have to invent some mode of being-together, and simultaneously deprived of any support in traditional ways of life, in inherited religious or ethnic life-forms.” Slavoj Zižek, The Universal Exception, Selected Writings, Volume Two (London: Continuum, 2006), 225.
- 43.
Žižek’s writes that “the Leninist October Revolution remains an Event, since it relates to the ‘class struggle’ as the symptomatic torsion of its situation, while the Nazi movement is a simulacrum, a disavowal of the trauma of the class struggle… The difference lies not in the inherent qualities of the Event itself, but in its place—in the way it relates to the situation out of which it emerged”. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, 162.
- 44.
Jean-Jacques Lecercle, “Cantor, Lacan, Mao, Beckett, Même Combat: The Philosophy of Alain Badiou”, Radical Philosophy, no. 93 (1999): 12.
- 45.
Or, as Yannis Stavrakakis writes: “In principle then, Badiou’s ‘event’ and Žižek’s ‘act’ seem to suffer from the same limitation: as soon as we accept a strict differentiation between positive and negative, good and bad, as soon as we prioritise one of these poles by disavowing the continuous interpenetration between positivity and negativity, we merely displace the problem into the realm of concrete ethico-political experience. We lose, however, at the same time, every theoretical/symbolic resource capable of supporting a proper ethical attitude in this unavoidable encounter with the real. I am not implying that one should look for a foolproof theoretical or metaphysical guarantee to guide such decisions more geometrico. I am merely suggesting that something is missing here: a space (partially) mediating between real and symbolic. There is no way to distinguish between true and false events, between events and simulacra, because Badiou’s theoretical edifice does not offer a suitable space in which this operation would make sense”. Yannis Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left: Psychoanalysis, Theory, Politics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 123.
- 46.
Simon Critchley points to the difficulty of discerning true from false events and one could very well wonder with Critchley: “[I]f true just means true for the subject—then why not go on to conclude that every event is the consequence of what Gramsci or Ernesto Laclau would call hegemonic articulation?” Simon Critchley, “Demanding Approval: On the Ethics of Alain Badiou”, Radical Philosophy, no. 100 (2000): 23.
- 47.
Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, 272.
- 48.
Žižek attempts to revive the notion of “the dictatorship of the proletariat” in In Defense of Lost Causes, 412.
- 49.
As remarked in Sect. 3.1, Žižek has embraced Nietzsche’s image of Paul as the inventor of Christianity.
- 50.
This ambiguity with regard to totalitarianism in Žižek is produced by statements like this: “Badiou hit the mark with his apparently wired claim that ‘Today, the enemy is not called Empire or Capital. It’s called Democracy.’ It is the ‘democratic illusion,’ the acceptance of democratic procedures as the sole framework for any possible change, that blocks any radical transformation of capitalist relations”. Slavoj Žižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously (London: Verso, 2012), 87.
- 51.
Žižek does refer to uprisings against dictatorships as Truth-Events as well, for instance, in his writings about the Arab spring or the Iranian revolution in 1979. Ibid., 70. Another example of a discernment of a Truth-Event with an explicitly Pauline foundation in Gal 3:28 is to be found in Žižek’s view of Palestinian resistance against Israeli occupation as a universal struggle. Here Žižek recognizes a universalism without acknowledging that such a struggle could very well be legitimate within the liberal democratic ideology Žižek is so eager to defy, since the Israeli occupation is regarded as illegitimate according to several UN resolutions and international law. Nonetheless, Israelis who refuse to do military service in the Occupied Territories might well serve, for Žižek, as loyalists to his Truth-Event. In that particular case, Gal 3:28 is said to speak of Jews and Palestinians, not Jew and Greek: “And there resides the difficult ethical test for contemporary Israelis: ‘Love thy neighbour’ means ‘Love the Palestinian,’ or it means nothing at all. This refusal, significantly downplayed by the major media, is an authentic ethical act. It is here, in such acts, that, as Paul would have put it, there effectively are no longer Jews or Palestinians, full members of the polity and homines sacri”. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n10/slavoj-Žižek/are-we-in-a-war-do-we-have-an-enemy. Accessed 11.09.16.
- 52.
Perhaps the promotion of the public and intellectual figure of Slavoj Žižek as “the most dangerous philosopher of the West” should remind us about the danger of Paulinism. As the biblical scholar James Crossley rightly asks, “Whereas the imposition of Marxism did become a Red Bureaucracy, did not Paul’s letters and Christian theology become Empire? (…) If we are to take this one step further and follow Badiou’s line of fidelity to the ‘event’, are we not on the slippery slope to the defences of Stalin’s mass murders or the Inquisition, both in the name of fidelity to the event despite things not quite working out as it seemed?” James G. Crossley, Reading the New Testament: Contemporary Approaches (London: Routledge, 2011), 112.
- 53.
As in a statement like this, concerning the likeness of Paul and Lenin: “The return to Lenin is the endeavor to retrieve the unique moment when a thought already transposes itself into a collective organization, but does not yet fix itself into an Institution (the established Church, the IPA, the Stalinist Party-State). It aims neither at nostalgically reenacting the ‘good old revolutionary times,’ nor at the opportunistic-pragmatic adjustment of the old program to ‘new conditions,’ but at repeating, in the present world-wide conditions, the Leninist gesture of initiating a political project that would undermine the totality of the global liberal-capitalist world order, and, furthermore, a project that would unabashedly assert itself as acting on behalf of truth, as intervening in the present global situation from the standpoint of its repressed truth. What Christianity did with regard to the Roman Empire, this global ‘multiculturalist’ polity, we should do with regard to today’s Empire”. Žižek, On Belief, 4–5.
- 54.
The lack of such reservations is the reason to suggest why Žižek’s “structural homology” between what he considers as Jewish and Pauline messianic time expressed by Franz Rosenzweig and “the logic of the revolutionary process” he finds in Rosa Luxemburg is a misleading one. Rosenzweig’s call for an anticipation in the form of the “wish to bring about the Messiah before his time” presupposes the eschatological reserve which is absent in Žižek. Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, 133. If there is such a secularized form of such a reserve in Žižek, it amounts to recognizing the unavoidable failure inherent in any revolutionary acts. This reserve does not serve as much to criticize this act as to legitimate the unavoidable failure or terror that follows a true revolution. The problem of such a terror is one that Žižek resolves through Hegel’s dialectics: “Hegel’s point is rather the enigma of why, in spite of the fact that revolutionary Terror was a historical deadlock, we have to pass through it in order to arrive at the modern rational State”. Living in the End Times, 27.
- 55.
The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, 236.
- 56.
The Fragile Absolute, or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?, 7.
- 57.
We assume that Žižek means dogmatism in the Kantian sense when he erroneously employs the word “dogmatic” here. See note about the distinction in Kant under Sect. 3.5. The Parallax View, 8–9.
- 58.
This is a distinction to be found in Kant’s essay “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’”: “But by the public use of one’s own reason I mean that use which anyone may make of it as a man of learning addressing the entire reading public”. Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ (London: Penguin Books, 2009), 4.
- 59.
Žižek, The Parallax View, 9.
- 60.
This attitude of Paul being proud, according to Žižek, probably has its origins in Badiou’s characterization of Paul: “Although himself a Roman citizen, and proud of it, Paul will never allow any legal categories to identify the Christian subject”. Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, 13.
- 61.
Žižek, Milbank, and Davis, 294.
- 62.
As translated in the NRSV version.
- 63.
Some of the origins of this accusation of the immaturity of feminists are probably to be found in Žižek’s Lacanian framework for understanding gender; Žižek does not conceive of gender inequality as primarily resulting from economic exploitation and class struggle. This inequality is rather interpreted by Žižek as attributes that result from rather failed attempts to symbolize and name an ahistorical universal deadlock or trauma of humankind. In other words, the feminine and masculine are psychological structures before they become part of and intertwined in social structures, which are necessarily a result of class struggles. Žižek’s ideological analyses have been criticized, for instance, for repeating Lacan’s antifeminism. Sarah Herbold, “Well-Placed Reflections: On Woman as Symptom of Man”, in Traversing the Fantasy: Critical Responses to Slavoj Žižek, ed. Geoff Boucher, Jason Glynos, and Matthew Sharpe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 139.
- 64.
Slavoj Zižek, Trouble in Paradise: From the End of History to the End of Capitalism (London: Allen Lane, 2014), 57.
- 65.
Žižek’s answer would be that sexual difference is something we all share, but are equally unable to think. He bases his reflections on sexual difference on Lacan, where this difference serves as a kind of ideal type or example that “reality can never match”. Andrea Hurst, Derrida Vis-À-Vis Lacan: Interweaving Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 238. Since Žižek writes of sexual difference as pertaining to the Lacanian domain of the Real and not the symbolic, his theorizing of it does seem to imply that social variations of human sexuality are somehow conditioned or restricted by an original heterosexual norm, since norms belong precisely to the Lacanian symbolic.
- 66.
Caputo and Alcoff, 171.
- 67.
By ambiguous here I refer to the uncertainty about under which conditions Žižek would call for an armed uprising against a formally democratic elected government, legitimized by the liberal ideology which Žižek so persistently writes polemically against.
- 68.
Žižek has also proclaimed that Schmitt’s “ultra-politics”, which is detectable in “fundamentalisms”, is “the form in which the foreclosed political returns in the post-political universe of pluralist negotiation and consensual regulation”. Slavoj Žižek, “Carl Schmitt in the Age of Post-Politics”, in The Challenge of Carl Schmitt, ed. Chantal Mouffe (London: Verso, 1999), 35.
- 69.
Žižek’s tale of the Southern Baptist from a Larry King debate in 2000 testifies to some of Žižek’s attraction to the dichotomist language of Christianity. This Southern Baptist declared that according “to the letter of the Gospel”, “a lot of good and honest people will burn in hell”. It is “the materialist version” of such a posture that Žižek appears to encounter in Paul. On Belief, 1.
- 70.
First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), 44–45.
- 71.
“The key-problem with the so-called identity politics is that they focus on ‘private’ identities—the ultimate horizon is that of tolerance and intermingling of such identities, and every universality, every feature that cuts across the entire field, as oppressive. Paulinian universality, in contrast, is a struggling form”. Ibid., 44.
- 72.
The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, 45–46.
- 73.
There is one specific example of such a universalist struggle in the text, with Israelis joining hands with Palestinians against the Israeli occupation: “Some months ago, a small miracle happened in the occupied West Bank: Palestinian women who were demonstrating against the wall were joined by a group of Jewish lesbian women from Israel. The initial mutual mistrust was dispelled in the first confrontation with the Israeli soldiers guarding the wall, and a sublime solidarity developed, with a traditionally dressed Palestinian woman embracing a Jewish lesbian with spiked purple hair—a living symbol of what our struggle should be”. Ibid., 46.
- 74.
This is the case in all of Žižek’s paraphrases or quotations of Gal 3:28 referred to so far. In addition, this pattern can be detected in The Fragile Absolute, or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?, 111. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, 46. Living in the End Times, 106.
- 75.
Riches, 204–07. M. Wright IV William, “Galatians 3:28 in Thomas Aquinas’ Lectures on the Pauline Letters: A Study in Thomistic Reception”, Journal of the Bible and its Reception 2, no. 1 (2015).
- 76.
Riches, 209.
- 77.
John M. G. Barclay, “‘Am I Not a Man and a Brother?’ The Bible and the British Anti-Slavery Campaign”, The Expository Times 119, no. 1 (2007).
- 78.
“Increased lack of evidence” is compared to the scholarly situation when egalitarian readings were more common within historical and contextual approaches to the verse.
- 79.
Neutel, 144–83.
- 80.
“In part, they [Badiou and Žižek] remain stuck in this mode of narration because they inherit Paul largely from a German philosophical tradition that was both informed, and inspirational for, histories of ideas as we see them in, say, Hegel’s lectures on history or on the history of religion.” Blanton, “Mad with the Love of Undead Life”, 206.
- 81.
In part, Barclay backs up Badiou’s reading since he thinks the New Perspective in the case of Ed Sanders has gone too far in underestimating the novelty of Paul’s thought and the break implied by it. Confronted by the exaggerated novelty of Paul posited in Žižek’s works, however, I feel compelled to also move in the opposite direction.
- 82.
Barclay, “Paul and the Philosophers: Alain Badiou and the Event”, 176.
- 83.
This is an image Žižek himself also reproduces or disseminates, as observed in Sect. 5.2 where Žižek considers “the Jewish way” as representing “ethnic fundamentalism”. Žižek, Revolution at the Gates: A Selection of Writings from February to October 1917, 316.
- 84.
“In terms of ethnicity, his [Paul’s] required that all human cultural specificities—first and foremost, that of Jews—be eradicated, whether or not the people in question were willing. Moreover, since of course, there is no such thing as cultural unspecificity, merging of all people into one common culture means ultimately (as it has meant in the history of European cultural imperialism) merging all people into the dominant culture.” Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California press, 1997), 8.
- 85.
Pamela Michelle Eisenbaum, Paul Was Not a Christian: The Real Message of a Misunderstood Apostle (New York: HarperOne, 2009), 9. In contrast to this fixed view of identity, I presuppose identity as a social construction, where one element among others may be activated or deactivated, depending on particular social contexts.
- 86.
In spite of the social and cosmological gender hierarchy presupposed by Paul (see Sect. 3.3.4), there is some important truth in Kahl’s statement that “Paul allows identities and hierarchies to float and not to be fixed. It is difference as such Paul is going to redefine”. Brigitte Kahl, “Gender Trouble in Galatia?”, in Is There a Future for Feminist Theology?, ed. Deborah Sawyer and Diane M. Collier (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), 67. As an example of this Pauline instability with regard to gender, one might appreciate Kahl’s reading of Paul’s “queer” appearance in Gal 3:19 as a mother “painfully trying to rebirth his/her Galatian children in the shape of Christ”. “No Longer Male: Masculinity Struggles Behind Galatians 3.28?,” 42.
- 87.
I do not consider it necessary to situate my reading within the debates about the overall purpose with the letter to the Galatians, nor its specific genre or the identity of Paul’s opponents. Mark D. Nanos, The Galatians Debate: Contemporary Issues in Rhetorical and Historicaliinterpretation (Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, 2002). Nonetheless, I consider it wise to highlight the hypothetical character of readings that, to a high degree, rely on a reconstruction of the addressees’ historical context in Galatia, and to be particularly alert to the danger of circularity in the arguments and mirror readings of the letter. Gitte Buch-Hansen, “The Politics of Beginnings: Cosmology, Christology and Covenant: Gospel Openings Reconsidered in the Light of Paul’s Pneumatology”, in Mark and Paul: Comparative Essays Part Ii, for and against Pauline Influence on Mark, ed. Eve-Marie; Engberg-Pedersen Becker, Troels; Müller, Mogens (Berlin: Gruyter, 2014), 231.
- 88.
In Rom 1:14, the pair of opposition is one of effective subversion of the dominant, asymmetrical “Greek and barbarian”, since Paul declares himself to be equally indebted to both groups of people. “Paul’s language of ‘indebtedness’ not only relativises the ethnic and linguistic divide of antiquity (v. 14a), but also cultural and educational stereotypes, including the social denigration of barbarians.” James R. Harrison, “Paul’s Indebtedness to the Barbarian (Rom 1:14) in Latin West Perspective”, Novum Testamentum 55, no. 4 (2013): 312.
- 89.
Christopher D. Stanley, “Paul the Ethnic Hybrid?”, in The Colonized Apostle: Paul through Postcolonial Eyes, ed. Christopher D. Stanley (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011), 119.
- 90.
Ibid.
- 91.
In contrast to what is assumed by the New Perspective scholars and a representative of the two-ways paradigm (the Radical perspective), Paul’s conceptualization of the gentiles may constitute some of the historical novelty of Paul: The existence of a nonconventional notion of gentiles in Paul is hypothesized in Ishay Rosen-Zvi and Adi Ophir, “Paul and the Invention of the Gentiles”, Jewish Quarterly Review 105, no. 1 (2015): 23.
- 92.
Stanley, 119.
- 93.
Denise Kimber Buell and Caroline Johnson Hodge, “The Politics of Interpretation: The Rhetoric of Race and Ethnicity in Paul”, Journal of Biblical Literature 123, no. 2 (2004): 238.
- 94.
See scheme with terms referring to non-Jews in Stanley, 119.
- 95.
This grouping might consist of more than merely defining: “And so when Paul declares in Rom 11.13, ‘I speak to you gentiles’, he is not simply defining his audience but interpellating them, in the full Althusserian sense, into gentility”. Rosen-Zvi and Ophir, 31.
- 96.
“Paul expects gentiles in Christ to make more radical adjustments than he has made.” Caroline Johnson Hodge, “Apostle to the Gentiles: Constructions of Paul’s Identity”, Biblical Interpretation: A Journal of Contemporary Approaches 13, no. 3 (2005): 286.
- 97.
This is a commonly recognized literary structure of the argument. J. Louis Martyn, Galatians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, 1st ed. (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 378. Hans Dieter Betz extends the argument back to 3:1, but shares the view that the conclusion comes in 4:7. Betz, 21.
- 98.
Pamela Eisenbaum, “A Remedv for Having Been Born of Woman: Jesus, Gentiles, and Genealogy in Romans”, Journal of Biblical Literature 123, no. 4 (2004). One can indeed appreciate Eisenbaum’s hypotheses about the historical background to Paul’s theme of Abrahamic ancestry without accepting the two-ways-paradigm, as exemplified by Buch-Hansen, 233.
- 99.
This is partly why the image of Paul as the Galatians’ mother in Gal 4:19 possesses such a rhetorical force and destabilizes former identities, as Brigitte Kahl has suggested.
- 100.
The priority of the Jew, which I have emphasized, does not imply, however, that I accept the two-ways-paradigm nor the assumption that Paul’s statements never implied critical attitudes toward any aspects of the plural first-century Judaism.
- 101.
“All the material we have reviewed—biblical, and extra-biblical Jewish writings, Josephus, rabbis, and outsiders whether pagan or Christian—emphasize circumcision as the sine qua non of becoming a Jew.” Paula Fredriksen, “Judaism, the Circumcision of Gentiles, and Apocalyptic Hope: Another Look at Galatians 1 and 2”, The Journal of Theological Studies 42, no. 2 (1991): 546.
- 102.
See note 1007 under 8.4.3.
- 103.
Given that the label of Universalist is so charged with meanings from Christian supersessionism and the transcending of what has been regarded as Jewish particulars, “cosmopolitanism” is useful as a supplementary term. Karin Neutel has argued that cosmopolitan is an adequate term for Paul’s vision in Gal 3:28: “I would conclude that we should consider Paul’s eschatological thought as a form of Jewish cosmopolitanism. Paul’s thought is no less Jewish for being cosmopolitan, but stands in a tradition that includes such diverse texts as the Sibylline Oracles and the works of Philo. Similarly, it is no less cosmopolitan for being Jewish, but describes a unified humanity in the terms of a distinct culture, just as Greek and Roman authors do. Paul’s statements about circumcision, his discussion of Abraham and his view of the law can all be understood as a working out of several concrete points of this Jewish cosmopolitan view, in the specific context of his understanding of Christ”. Neutel, 141.
- 104.
“The belief in a Messiah known to have died must have struck many prima facie as odd and incredible; a Messiah without a Messianic age, irrelevant. But the enthusiastic proclamation of a Messiah executed very recently by Rome as a political troublemaker—a crucified Messiah—combined with a vision of the approaching End preached also to Gentiles—this was dangerous. News of an impending Messianic kingdom, originating from Palestine, might trickle out via the ekklesia’s Gentiles to the larger urban population. It was this (by far) larger, unaffiliated group that posed a real and serious threat. Armed with such a report, they might readily seek to alienate the local Roman colonial government, upon which Jewish urban populations often depended for support and protection against hostile Gentile neighbours. The open dissemination of the Messianic message, in other words, put the entire Jewish community at risk”. Fredriksen, 556.
- 105.
The openness to such a perspective would make Barclay’s second criticism of the New Perspective even more legitimate: “At times the new perspective seems to hark back to the Enlightenment valorization of the universal over the particular (introduced into New Testament studies by F. C. Baur), a valorization which always denigrates Judaism as the narrow, limited and the ethnocentric. At other times, appeal is made to the ‘equal rights’ of Gentiles alongside Jews (so Krister Stendahl), as if Paul were somehow driven by an ideology of universal human rights”. Barclay, “Paul and the Philosophers: Alain Badiou and the Event”, 180.
- 106.
An argument for such an extended understanding of the eschatological-pilgrimage motif is found in Matthew V. Novenson, “The Jewish Messiahs, the Pauline Christ, and the Gentile Question”, Journal of Biblical Literature 128, no. 2 (2009).
- 107.
Kahl, Galatians Re-Imagined: Reading with the Eyes of the Vanquished, 223.
- 108.
This cosmopolitanism does not have to be restricted to the historical sense of the term, presupposed by Karin Neutel, though it might also be informed by it: “Like the sources on ideal communities, Paul’s letters are focused on promoting harmony and on preventing conflict, and emphasize the importance of reciprocal relationships. The same concern for unity, egalitarian relationships and the same emphasis on brotherhood and mutuality that are evident in Philo and Josephus, and in a way also in Plato, can be seen in Paul”. Neutel, 69.
- 109.
John M. G. Barclay, “‘Neither Jew nor Greek’: Multiculturalism and the New Perspective on Paul”, in Ethnicity and the Bible, ed. Mark G. Brett (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 211.
- 110.
An indication of this is that half a century later, when Roman authors increasingly refer to this subgroup as “Christians”, this label will primarily connote “criminal” without religious associations in the popular mindset. “‘Jews’ and ‘Christians’ in the Eyes of Roman Authors”, in Jews and Christians in the First and Second Centuries: How to Write Their History, ed. Peter J. Tomson and Joshua Schwartz (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 320.
- 111.
“The key dimension of Paul’s gesture is thus his break with any form of communitarianism: his universe is no longer that of the multitude of groups that want to ‘find their voice,’ and assert their particular identity, their ‘way of life,’ but that of a fighting collective grounded in the reference to an unconditional universalism.” Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, 130.
- 112.
My reading here is in tune with John M. G. Barclay’s reading, laid out in Barclay, “‘Neither Jew nor Greek’: Multiculturalism and the New Perspective on Paul”.
- 113.
One might add that this was the God who, in the earlier history of Israel, installed the Davidic Kingdom. The militaristic language of expansion, triumph, conquered or defeated refers not only to the present apocalyptic battle, but also to the imagined theocratic battle in Israel’s history.
- 114.
Kahl, Galatians Re-Imagined: Reading with the Eyes of the Vanquished, 222.
- 115.
Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, 5, 66.
- 116.
Žižek, “Carl Schmitt in the Age of Post-Politics”, 36.
- 117.
In fact, many of Žižek’s calls for a violation of political liberalism run counter to his stances in actual political struggles. He endorsed such a movement as the Occupy Wall Street, which included groups and activists that will not return to Lenin and eschew feminism or multiculturalism.
- 118.
Žižek gained his position within Western academia with his Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), which offers no political alternatives, but is all the more an articulation and foundation of a new critique of ideology.
- 119.
Judith Butler: “What Žižek offers us is an insight into invariant aporetic and metaleptic structures that afflict all performativity within politics. But what remains less clear to me is how one moves beyond such a dialectical reversal or impasse to something new”. Butler, Laclau, and Žižek, 29.
- 120.
See my criticism of his Paul earlier. For a criticism of his political philosophy, see for instance, Ernesto Laclau’s reply to Žižek’s criticism of his and Judith Butler’s alleged inability to question capitalist market economy: “The reader must excuse me for smiling at the naïve self-complacence this revolutionary passage reflects. For if Butler and I are not envisaging ‘the possibility of a thoroughly different economico-political regime’, Žižek is not doing so either. In his previous essay Žižek had told us that he wanted to overthrow capitalism; now we are served notice that he also wants to do away with liberal democratic regimes—to be replaced, it is true, by a thoroughly different regime which he does not have the courtesy of letting us know anything about”. Ibid., 289. Roland Boer has described the allegations from Butler and Laclau, collected in the book, as one of the major reasons for Žižek’s turn to Paul. Žižek attempts to become a political thinker and not just an analyst of ideology through Paul: “To put it as bluntly as possible, it seems to me that Žižek emerges as a political writer only after the exchange with Ernesto Laclau and Judith Butler in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, and that dispensing the murk of his political credentials in terms of Leninist Marxism could happen only with and by means of Paul”. Boer, 338. While I think Boer’s assertion that this Marxist turn could only happen with Paul is somewhat exaggerated, its main point appears correct: Žižek’s turn to Badiou’s philosophy and Badiou’s Paul occurs while he is met by such a criticism. Accordingly, Žižek’s interest in Paul is conditioned by the purpose of appropriating Marxism as not only a source for ideological critique, but also for a more positively political thought.
- 121.
Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, 119.
- 122.
Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking Recognition”, New Left Review, no. 3 (2000): 108.
- 123.
Judith Butler, “Merely Cultural”, Social Text, no. 52/53 (1997).
- 124.
Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, 271.
- 125.
In Butler.
- 126.
Slavoj Žižek, “When the Party Commits Suicide”, New Left Review, no. 238 (1999).
- 127.
Nancy Fraser, “Heterosexism, Misrecognition, and Capitalism: A Response to Judith Butler”, ibid., no. I/228 (1997).
- 128.
Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange (London; New York: Verso, 2003), 49.
- 129.
She highly appreciates redistributive concerns in a liberal political philosophy like John Rawls’. In that way, she would be able to more consistently argue for the worth of the social achievements in “countries like Norway” where “all the main agents respect a basic social agreement” and “productivity and dynamism remain at extraordinarily high levels”. Žižek, Living in the End Times, 359.
- 130.
Charles Taylor and Amy Gutmann, Multiculturalism and “the Politics of Recognition” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 25–73. Fraser criticizes Taylor and Honneth for conceiving misrecognition “in terms of impaired subjectivity and damaged self-identity”. In contrast, Fraser affirms that misrecognition should be considered a matter of justice, with the notion of class or status. Fraser and Honneth, 28. Moreover, Fraser rejects Honneth’s conception of maldistribution, which she deems “a reductive culturalist view of distribution”. She maintains against Honneth that not all aspects of unequal share of the material goods in society can be a result of misrecognition. Ibid., 35.
- 131.
Ibid., 25.
- 132.
Ibid., 74. Another well-known example from the more recent debate about global economic inequality would be Thomas Picketty’s proposal of taxation as primary instrument for alleviating unfortunate social consequences of economic inequalities. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014).
- 133.
Such an engagement with Paul as well as Derrida on the question of justice is exemplified in Jennings, Reading Derrida/Thinking Paul: On Justice. Outlaw Justice: The Messianic Politics of Paul.
- 134.
Roland Boer and Jorunn Økland, Marxist Feminist Criticism of the Bible (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2008), 3.
- 135.
Kahl, “No Longer Male: Masculinity Struggles Behind Galatians 3.28?”, 42–43.
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Løland, O.J. (2018). Paul against Empire: Žižek’s Political Paul. In: The Reception of Paul the Apostle in the Works of Slavoj Žižek. Radical Theologies and Philosophies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91728-3_5
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