II.2
Ghost Writing
The question of the author is also central to Deissmann and
Heidegger’s readings of Paul, but rather than perceived through the mirror of
popular press, Deissmann and Heidegger both discussed religion in the context
of the rapid expansion of “tele-technologies” or technologies of distance (22).
Both Deissmann and Heidegger promise to dredge the “authentic Paul” from the
depths of theological sedimentation (107), yet in their haste to found a
(re)new(ed) way of life and authentic category of relation, both the critic and
the philosopher forget the circuitous production of the Pauline letters
themselves; Blanton contends that they forget one small, nearly imperceptible
voice in the (indisputable) Pauline canon, that of Tertius: “I Tertius, the
writer of this letter, greet you in the Lord” (Rom 16:22; NRSV). Tertius,
Paul’s anonymous and all but forgotten secretary, his ghost writer, confronts the reader with an always already present
relativization of the question of authorship and authenticity, a “play of
mirrors” that marks “the very moment of the enunciation in which an authentic
European modernity becomes indistinguishable from the lived experience of the
apostle” (77). Blanton’s rediscovery of the ghost writer Tertius similarly
relativizes the binary that had become constitutive of the modern subject and,
indeed, of modernism itself—the binary between the inside and outside of
religion, between religious and secular, by affirming the originary bond that
yokes religion to technologies of mediation.
Blanton’s book thus portrays the spectralization of Paul in the context of new modes of production
and new networks of communication, including the newspaper industry of Hegel
and Strauss’s time and the forms of global distance communication developed soon
afterward. If I speak of the “spectralization” of Paul, I do so in two senses
of the word: first, in the sense of a “spectrum,” a continuum of infinite
variation with no fixed set of values that constantly undermines (and,
paradoxically, underdetermines) scholarly and philosophical attempts to get at
authenticity, authorship and community; and second, in the sense of a
“specter,” the haunting lapse between being and non-being from which Paul’s
deracinated voice continues to murmur. Blanton shows how, with the unwitting assistance
of biblical critics and philosophers alike, the specter of Paul has merged,
like the ghosts of Kairo, with
humankind’s most advanced technologies to remake the world.
Though necessarily incomplete, Blanton’s book is a timely and
deserved critique of the pretensions of any scholarship on the New Testament or
early Christianity that purports to have sole claim to unbiased representation.
Indeed, Blanton reveals something as crude as the very joists undergirding such
presumptions, exposing the vulgar historical machinations of the modernist
will-to-a-discipline of religion and religious studies. Furthermore, Blanton’s
call for dialogue and cross-boundary literacy offers a promising alternative to
the current, quasi-essentialist disciplinary arrangement, which, as it is
currently organized, effectively limits or outright prevents concentrated focus
on shared underlying problems. Blanton does not use his own framework to
examine the contemporary use of Paul by secular continental philosophers and
their reception by New Testament scholars; but if Blanton is correct that new
technologies force the continual machinistic reconfiguration of religion, one
may attempt to ascertain the primary technological site of the current
disciplinary disputes. I have already suggested that Paul’s new haunt, indeed
the haunt of all the old specters, is the Internet—the tele-technology par
excellence. This is the perspective from which I will approach Stanislas
Breton’s philosophical treatise on Paul.
