III.3
In the second chapter, Breton discerns in several Pauline
texts a polyvalent allegorical method—not uniquely Pauline but singularly
employed nevertheless—that “plunges time into eternity” and “immerses eternity
in time” (58) in an unconcluding, transpositional activity of divine and human
agents that establishes an a/temporal reciprocity between time and eternity,
between memory and promise. According to Breton, this hermeneutics of allegory
is Paul’s best attempt to guarantee, in the “least harmful way possible” (71),
the Jewish people’s elect place relative to the new covenant of Christ.
Focusing on the use of narrative in apostolic discourse, especially in Acts
(e.g., 7:1-53, 17:23ff.), Breton attempts to show how allegory, in addition to
establishing a new mode of historical navigation, universalizes the
memory/promise operation at the heart of Jewish prophetic history. The
“being-toward” evoked by such recapitulations of the prophetic traditions makes
all the events and figures to be, in some way, pre-events and pre-figurations
of the Christ (64). These narratives, biblical or otherwise, are threaded
together by their categorical unfulfillment (66), which leads the messianic
community to a totalized anticipation, whose value is fixed (so to speak) by
the apostle Paul on Christ; Christ is always the same referent with an infinite
number of significations (68).
The bleeding together of time and eternity that Breton
speaks of—I will call it “heterogeneous a/temporality”—creates of the Hebrew
Bible, and indeed of the entire world, a hypertext
in which narratives link to one another in an infinite sprawl of instantly
accessible information, navigable with a “click” but whose end or beginning can
never be reached. One navigates the sea of data with intuition. Furthermore,
Breton’s allegory attempts to construct out of history a horizontal, that is to
say non-hierarchical, field of information organized into interrelated clusters
that ceaselessly establish connections with each another—Paul was attempting to
transform history into a Deleuzean rhizome, the totality of which is the human
anticipation for Christ. What we may now call rhizomatic or hypertextual
history works through associative “links,” the establishment of which, it turns
out, is precisely the aim of Breton’s Paul: “According to Paul, the allegorical
method responds to a specific function…: to restore between the old and the new
an essential link, beyond the break established by its own conversion and, more
generally, by ‘being-Christian’” (68). Therefore, if allegory creates the necessary
“links” to hold together the community, it does so by safeguarding a sense of
temporality that maintains a delicate dialectical balance between the
continuity and discontinuity of history.
Some sort of mediating technology is necessary for
establishing such links. But what technology could allow for this unhindered
ability to navigate world-information? For Paul and his scriptures, the answer
was not technology but technique—Paul embodied the scriptures, and they were
thus imminently and infinitely transposable—but Breton projects onto Paul a
universalism that is impossible to embody. The form of mediation Breton is
searching for, then, is the Internet, or, one might say, an imagined Internet.
In 1988, of course, Breton may not have even heard of the Internet, much less
experimented with its capabilities, but this impulse, this irrepressible
longing for a purer form of technological mediation, leads him to imagine it.
And yet, Breton’s Internet, the one he so skillfully and convincingly imagines
for us, remains unknown, even unknowable. Like Strauss’s newspaper, this new
form of mediation promises more than it can ever deliver. Nevertheless,
Breton’s fantasy, his fabulation, resurfaces throughout the book, taking the
shape of a determined reimagining of other debated concepts central to Pauline
discourse.
