[Farewell to Paul! Full title: The Spectralization of Paul: Framing Philosophical
Investigations of Early Christianity]
Blanton, Ward. Displacing
Christian Origins: Philosophy, Secularity, and the New Testament. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2007. Pp. xii + 220; Breton, Stanislas. A Radical Philosophy of Saint Paul. New
York: Columbia University Press, 2011 [1988]. Pp. 170.
A spectre is haunting Europe.
---Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels, The Communist Manifesto
And were there one day to be here,
where there are no days, which is no place, born of the impossible voice the
unmakable being, and a gleam of light, still all would be silent and empty and
dark, as now, as soon now, when all will be ended, all said, it says, it
murmurs.
---Samuel Beckett, Texts for Nothing
I.
Introduction
The premise of the dreamlike Japanese horror film Kairo (2001), released in the United
States as Pulse, is that the spirit
world has reached its maximum occupancy and, having nowhere else to go, ghosts
have begun spilling over into the human world to claim new territory. Entering
an access port, these ghosts begin circulating on the new medium of the
Internet, through which the ghosts remake the world in their own image and
intensify a general sociological trend toward isolation in a process akin to
reverse-terraforming. Humans who encounter these ghosts are reduced to a state
of bare life and soon crumble into small, ash-like particles, leaving a black
imprint on the walls—a poignant allusion to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The film
ends with the tenuous hope of the last remaining men and women of Japan,
possibly of the entire earth, who are on a boat, sailing toward a faint radio
signal from Latin America where other survivors may have gathered.
As many receptive critics have noted, Kairo is a profound meditation on communication and isolation in
the postmodern world that questions the ability of the Internet to provide a
sense of human connectivity. The symbolic importance of the ghost can hardly be
overlooked in this case. The ghost, the specter, is neither a being nor a
non-being. The specter is not simply the point of coincidence of being and
non-being, either; it can only be referred to as a lacuna or threshold between
these categories, a topological distortion that constantly redraws the
boundaries between life and death, between the human and the inhuman, by
constantly displacing one with the other. The title of the film is equally
important. Unlike the polysemantic English title, Pulse, which can refer both to the arterial palpitation of the
cardiovascular system as well as the intended sense of signal processing, the
Japanese word Kairo (回路) means simply “circuit” or
“loop,” with no intended organic connotation. This is essential to
understanding the sociological argument of the film: the Internet does not
“lead” anywhere but back to itself; the promise of immediate presence or
unmediated communion is again deferred.
And yet, for many, the Internet is a source of hope, inasmuch
as it has the capacity to organize and prompt radical change—and, certainly,
such global popular movements as the Arab Spring or the Occupy protests would
not have been possible without this mediating technology. What, then, is the
world-function of the Internet? I do not pretend to have an answer to such a
question, though I will attempt to add a new sense of density to the way we ask
it. Developing several suggestive remarks in Ward Blanton’s 2007 monograph on
the interplay between disciplinary boundaries and mediating technology, this
essay will attempt to provide a reading of Stanislas Breton’s stunning 1988
philosophical reflection on the Apostle Paul, which has just been published in
English as A Radical Philosophy of Saint
Paul. I will argue that Pauline Christianity, as Breton understands it,
requires a new form of technological mediation to usher in the heterogeneous
and overlapping spatio-temporality of messianic anticipation actualized through
a dispossessed community. This imagined form of mediation points in the
direction of “our” Internet, the liberative promise of which has been
compromised by the mechanizations of world capitalism, whose markets have, like
“Paul” or the notion of “text” itself, transitioned into a spectral form.
