III.1
Radicalness
and Domestication:
A
Material Encounter with Breton’s Saint
Paul
Readers who approach A
Radical Philosophy of Saint Paul expecting a perspective akin to Žižek or
Badiou may be disappointed to discover that Breton is quite committed to a spiritually
inflected interpretation of Paul’s mission and thought. Breton is, after all, a
Catholic theologian by vocation, and his understanding of the Apostle, though
quite radical in places, is more informed by Saint Thomas Aquinas than Saint
Marx or Saint Lacan. For this reason, I will begin my discussion of Breton’s A Radical Philosophy of Saint Paul not
with the text but with the book—that is, with the material component of the
text as it is presented to today’s English reader. Beginning this way will complement
both Blanton’s discussion of mediating technology and my reflections on the spectralization
of Paul.
Breton’s book was originally published in 1988 with the much
less confrontational title Saint Paul.
The book’s first complete translation into English, 23 years later, is
presented to Anglophones by Columbia University Press, with a somewhat abstruse
introduction by Blanton, as part of a series called “Insurrections: Critical
Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture” (whose list of editors includes,
naturally, Slavoj Žižek). Of course, Breton’s book, hot on the heels of several
critical interventions into the philosophy of religion and the history of early
Christianity by a variety of radical European thinkers, could not have arrived
in English at a better time, or with a more seductive title: A Radical Philosophy of Saint Paul. To
the core “Saint Paul” is added “A Radical Philosophy of,” as if to say
this book could not have been published in English, would not have sold a copy,
with such an irresolute title. And how could this book have appeared today with
its original title, a title that, rather than hyping an alternative claim to the
Pauline legacy—as, indeed, it is expected to—would merely confront the
prospective buyer with its sparse dignity, its self-righteous ordinariness? The
author must choose a side, must align himself, and Breton, being dead, is
retroactively pushed through the hymen-like fold of US academic publishing and
disseminated, in a spectral body, as “one of the boys”—Žižek, Agamben, Badiou,
Taubes.
In this way, a particular flavor of radicalness is
cultivated, domesticated, and finally recouped into the stratified disciplinary
boundaries of the knowledge economy. This metaphorical rape of academia by
phallic capitalism is unsettlingly reified by the selection of cover art: a
single stream of smoke, curling upward, against a cavernous (or carnivorous?)
black background. Dare one ask what gave rise to this smoke? Was it the fire of
revolutionary fervor, untimely snuffed? Or does the smoke pour from a lone
militant’s rifle that, having fired its last bullet, now rests silently in
trembling hands? Or is the stream of smoke
a kind of astral vapor pitched hauntingly and haltingly between being and
non-being? Is it Paul’s specter, trapped in the book market, looking for
another, less commodified technology to haunt?
All of this is not to say that Columbia University Press is
guilty of intellectual grave-robbing or of intentionally perpetuating market
maintenance; rather, such reflections question the logic of an economic system
and culture in which Breton’s book, as valuable as it is, would not have been
translated and published had it not been for the “branding” of radicalness. It
is from this questioning and critical perspective that one can finally engage
the text, which, as it is published now, seems to swell with the radical wish
to present itself as other than it is. The words revolt against their
arrangement on the printed page and seem to demand another passageway from text
to reader, an alternative mediating technology beyond the reach of the free
market. In what follows, I will offer a reading of the text that focuses on
this subliminal and sublimating desire and follow it along the cultural
currents that lead to the (always already commodified and compromised)
Internet.
