V.
Synthesis—and
Reflection
My detailed analysis has uncovered several fascinating
linguistic and thematic currents in Rom 8:18-25 that serve to integrate the
passage more fully with the letter’s surrounding sections and arguments,
especially in its evocation of various Jewish motifs and narratives.
Furthermore, I showed how Paul’s use of those Jewish motifs and narratives are
used polemically to offer an alternative vision of ecology and anthropology to
the state ideology, which brutally subjected nature to the originary fiction
that empowers the sovereign. Finally, I showed how this passage, which is
characterized by a warm, reassuring tone, actually works to defer the
possibility of an ultimate resolution of the tensions that threatened the
ecclesia. Paul’s genius, I suggested, was less in “solving” problems than in
rephrasing the problem into an unassumable non-solution. Now, in these final
paragraphs, I want to turn from reading this passage in what I take to be
Paul’s context and produce a more open, self-reflexive meditation on the
problems and uses of such a passage today, especially in the context of radical
leftist politics.
Richard A. Horsley remarks in the introduction to an edited
volume that Paul was “in but not of” the Roman imperial order,[i]
and while it would be unfair to expect of Paul to fashion a coherent, mobilized
resistance to the Roman imperial order, as much as modern readers might like
him to, perhaps it is the liminality experienced by Paul that is reflected in
his destabilizing solution to the problems of sovereign power and ethnic
difference. Today, the contemporary left finds itself in a similar liminal situation,
as its radical project has been subjected to the futility signified by “the end
of history.” Thus, the contemporary left, as it undergoes its own crisis of
identity, might find a mirror for its concerns in passages such as 8:18-25, and
a possible way out, though the left must read Paul with a cautious and critical
eye, if it chooses to approach this figure as an ally. Paul’s unconscious
critique of the power of the secular sovereign is, after all, stabilized by
theological appeals to the divine sovereignty of an intervening God, a fact
that is unacceptable to the majority of the left because, as Paul clearly
shows, such “certainty” can be crippling to the mobilization of collective
action and resistance.
And yet Paul’s aim to defer resolution, which may be the
only way to establish a universalistic vision, speaks volumes to a fragmented,
internally disorganized left. That the solution to such disorganization is the
awareness and acceptance of disorganization opens the possibility of a new
universalism, founded not on claims but on action. For the left, or so the
well-rehearsed argument goes, no longer has recourse to alternative,
universalistic narratives to oppose the master narrative of world capitalism.[ii]
The recent return to speculative universalism advocated by the
“post-postmodern” left (including Badiou and Žižek) is at once a bold advance
and a retreat from the terrifying and liberating condition of constructing a
politics and praxis without reference to the now-defunct motivating force of
the Hegelian Idee, which, such
authors have argued, can no longer be experienced as constitutive of reality.
Karatani Kojin, a Japanese Marxist philosopher, presciently diagnosed the
situation in 1995 by evoking Marx’s critique of religion to frame the current debate
on the crisis of the left: “Communism’s collapse, however, has not led to the
total disintegration of the Idee,
because Idee is, from the beginning,
merely a Schein [semblance]…Although
communism as well is a mere Schein,
to criticize its ‘illusion’ means no more and no less than ‘to call on [people]
to give up a condition that requires illusions.’”[iii] I
have argued that Paul’s attempt at establishing an artificial sense of unity
and direction brings with it a powerfully destabilizing claim in the form of
radical hope. Paul’s hope took the shape of an eschatological awareness for
impending radical change, in anticipation of which he craned his neck along
with the enigma of creation. While he identified the source of this hope with
the hands of God, the hope of a secular leftist cannot be displaced onto an
actor outside of history. Instead, as Karatani insists, the loss of faith in
such ideals must come with the call for the realization of those ideals: The
hands that collaborate to make and shape history, therefore, will be human
hands.
[i] Introduction to Paul
and the Roman Imperial Order, 19.
[ii] See, for instance, Alain
Badiou’s own politico-philosophical reflection on the letters of Paul, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism,
trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 10.
[iii] Architecture as Metaphor: Language, Number, Money, ed. Michael
Speaks, trans. Kohso Sabu (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995), 187-188.
