September 21, 2012

The Spectralization of Paul (Part 10)


IV.
Data Compression (Conclusion)

Following Blanton’s critical investigation into the media environments of nineteenth and twentieth century scholars and philosophers, this essay has suggested that Breton’s radical reimagining of the Apostle Paul’s faith and mission can be read as a reconfiguration of religion in relation to contemporary information networks. But, significantly, Blanton’s argument does not stop there: the necessary task now facing religious and secular thinkers alike is a reimagining of the medial space that they inhabit as well as a pushing-forward into the uncharted, leaving signposts along the way for future inquiry. The only thinkable way to achieve this end, as Blanton himself suggests in his repeated admonitions toward interdisciplinary cooperation, is to forget the obsessive privileging of one’s own discourse and to take seriously one’s responsibility toward the discursive traditions of others. To do so, a provisional common language, a hybrid tongue fitting for subjects of difference, will be necessary.

This means that the “Christian legacy,” if scholars and philosophers together decide that it even exists and that it can still be useful in service of justice, can no longer be possessed by one or the other, to be used merely to constitute the hegemony of one’s own discipline or empower one’s own knowledge-producing machine. Paul must be shared.

September 20, 2012

The Spectralization of Paul (Part 9)


III.6

Breton thus introduces a formal disjunction between reality and appearance, meaning that the Christian exists in the as if or as though of 1 Cor 7:29-31:
The appointed time has grown short; from now on, let even those who have wives be as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no possessions, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. (NRSV)
And, one is tempted to add, let those who read Breton’s Saint Paul do so as though they did not read. A book that references such moving words is dancing to a close with a messianic anticipation of its own: an impetuous desire to be something other than a book.

It must be with some surprise, then, that Breton’s Saint Paul should encounter itself again, 23 years later and in English, both as a book (for the nostalgic among us) and as an instantly purchasable and downloadable stream of data. The latter option truly makes possible Paul’s dictum to buy without possessing, though this is probably not what Breton had in mind when imagining the liberative capacity of this new technology of mediation. The technological capabilities of the e-book are, of course, consistent with Breton’s demands for a new technology of mediation, making even the idea of a “concordance” seem patently anachronistic—texts are now their own concordance. But even this mediation is mediated by the market; even the one who reads this book as an e-book, with these added features, must feel a profound sense of disappointment or unfulfillment upon reaching the book’s conclusion. The spectralization of text and information has ushered in a new, semi-spectral movement of world capitalism: the commercialization of the Internet allows currency without currency to be exchanged for a book without a book—a spectralized book, which, despite everything, retains its status as “property.”

For those who purchase their e-book through Amazon.com, the book’s cover again deepens the irony: a fading wisp of smoke will be displayed on a machine called the “Kindle.” The fire of revolution, it turns out, was never even lit.

September 19, 2012

The Spectralization of Paul (Part 8)


III.5

Over and against the objections that Paul was an (inadvertent or otherwise) apologist for social order and the Pax Romana, the final chapters of Breton’s book argue for an interpretation of Paul’s mission that pursues his radical, utopian impulse. Chapter 5 focuses on Paul’s views of communion, community, churches, and the Church. To retrieve the original sense of “communion” in Paul, which, as his readers will be well aware, entailed much more than simply partaking of the Eucharist, Breton redefines the (Pauline) Christian as a creature of prepositions—the with of participation and, most importantly, the in of “being-in,” which “insinuates a more profound relation: the relation of a living being in the milieu of life where he is rooted, where he moves, in which he dwells, and where he remains, free to breathe in the native air” (128-129; italics original). The believer is in Christ, and, in the inversion, Christ is in the believer. This in turn founds a relationship and a communion through forms of abstract co-dependency rather than resemblance or authoritarian identification.

The function of community, which Breton summarizes as the “operant existence of communion” (130), makes this clear. Community is defined, above all, by a freedom from needing to be the same, whether because of external compulsions or internal anxieties that might produce a will-to-resemblance in some and a will-to-power in others (132). Community is an “unsupervised horizon” in which total dispossession, willful redistribution, and sharing are the authenticating marks (133). However, with the introduction of more converts from increasingly diverse socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds comes the increasing complexity of internal organization and the ascendency of authority. For Breton, the construction of the Pauline church is an exemplar of a more general, perhaps inevitable, historical process: “The more a given group grows in volume and qualitative diversity, the more the menace of centrifugal forces and internal dissentions intensifies, and the more, consequently, the weight of an indisputable authority imposes itself as an intervention, putting an end to the peril” (134). To safeguard the community from collapsing into sects, Paul must maintain a universal vision through rigorous “unicity” (135) that allows the churches to form part of the Church, a non-institutional, non-hierarchical non-structure that ensures the equality of all its participants.

But what is the unicity that undergirds the Church’s universality? It is, of course, the “body of death” (140). The brief final chapter radicalizes this insight into a call to arms—or, more precisely, to disarm—that provides a profound meditation on the sublime nothingness of the cross, in the non-face of which humans cease to be humans and God ceases to be God. This folly, this openly praised scandal upon which the Greeks and the Jews alike look with bafflement and contempt, is the absolute negation of society that comes to cause community and becomes the center of communion; it is the revocation of all identity so that humans, who now share in Christ’s own kenosis, might become slaves to a symbol of failure and servants of the world that they negate. One is called, in other words, to serve while rejecting the glory of service (149), or to serve without serving. For Breton, Paul makes possible something like the “true gift,” the unqualified gift of oneself to the world. In this formula, the gift of oneself is the gift of nothing—a weight without density for a time without duration.

September 18, 2012

The Spectralization of Paul (Part 7)


III.4

The third chapter continues with the spirited re-imagination of allegory and takes up the interminable debate between Faith and Law. Breton’s Paul is an antinomian with a difference, whose mission is to retrieve the “pre-nomic” core of the Torah (94). The Law, according to Paul according to Breton, confuses the believers not because of its precepts but because of its limitations and effects and status as divine law (87-88); though not sinful in and of itself, the Law nevertheless works against itself by becoming co-opted by a “negative grandeur,” an anonymous power to which all people, Jewish and Gentile alike, ultimately submit (89). Law must therefore be understood as a “provisional establishment” (90). As Breton would be expected to argue based on this declaration, Christ, whose name conceals an intractable mystery of infinite depth, establishes a new covenant in which he plays the mediator and re-closes the distance between God and humanity. In this way, “Unbound from law, faith transgresses all regionalism…Distinctions therefore no longer have the importance we have given them” (92-93). Central to Breton’s argument is his holistic reading of Romans, which, with a shrug toward the rigorous demands of historical-critical exegesis, takes faith as a “movement” and an “affirmation” that “prolongs the shock and rupture of conversion” and confirms the depth of a truth (85). To preserve this rupture ensures the integration of the Jews and Gentiles, which brings the Jews to the present fulfillment of the Law in Christ and moves the Gentiles into the past to the pre-nomic core of the faith of Abraham in what can be summarized as a double movement within heterogeneous a/temporality (94-95).

The fourth chapter moves from its discussion of Paul and time, the subject of the previous two chapters, to a discussion of Paul and space—“the Pauline Cosmos.” Altogether, the series of chapters from two to four develops a dislocative theory of spatio-temporality that asks the reader to understand space and time as a continually transforming topology. Breton writes, “[C]osmos (Welt) means, for Paul, the passage from an environment (Umwelt) to what overflows to the infinite, to that openness in which all regional landscapes are inscribed and fade away” (97). To pursue this, Breton understands the Pauline cosmos as a function rather than a substance, one that is characterized by “unlimited opening, insistent transit, and a permanent tension toward a ‘further-still’” (99). Breton develops his understanding of Pauline cosmology through readings of a deutero-Pauline and a Pauline text. First, Breton develops Pauline cosmology as a mirror to Paul’s Christology through a careful reading of Col 1:15-20, the well-known deutero-Pauline hymn. Its first verse describes Christ as “the Image” of God and “firstborn of all creation”; Breton reads this as the “unifying function” of Christ, articulated by the three key prepositions of this passage, in, by, and for (106-107). The second verse describes Christ as the “Beginning” and “firstborn from among the dead”; Breton reads this as the “function of gathering and reconciliation,” an enlargement of the “unifying function” (110-111). Second and most fascinatingly, Breton provides a reading of Rom 8:18-25 that adds a materialist density to the eschatological indeterminacy of the passage in order to emphasize the double bond that yokes humans to nature. His reading investigates the “circular figuration of salvation history” (122), which, somewhat like a Möbius strip, is a topological distortion, a coincidence of alpha and omega in which humans and nature alike pass through the past and the future without crossing over an “edge” of time. Breton’s reading methodology is closer in spirit and practice to a close reading or explication of poetry than to anything resembling modern exegesis, yet this allows Breton to make daring “links” and interpretations that may escape the concerns of the biblical critic.

September 17, 2012

The Spectralization of Paul (Part 6)


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.

September 14, 2012

The Spectralization of Paul (Part 5)


III.2

First, however, I will yield to Breton’s own stated intentions. Breton’s four-page preface immediately disturbs the historical and contemporary construction of disciplinary boundaries. Breton’s reading of Paul is not, by his own insistence, simple exegesis or theology, but an attempt to “identify a set of elements that might be of interest to the philosopher”—a gesture that frees Breton from responsibility toward the “immense literature” (scholarly and otherwise) on the Apostle, though he is clearly familiar with much of the then-recent debates on Paul’s identity (33). Breton’s perspectival difference also allows him to conduct his search with a wider field of textual support—in addition to the seven universally accepted letters, Breton sees no reason not to make use of the six others, of which Ephesians especially will be central to several arguments (Acts and even Hebrews will prove useful as well, though he does not say as much in the preface). By way of explanation, Breton writes, “In a work intended for philosophers, less concerned with the authenticity of a signature than with the authenticity of a thought, I permit myself access to all the letters of Saint Paul [as defined by the canon]. At the risk of systematic excessiveness, I thus take the liberty of recreating the message of man who was nothing less than a philosopher by trade” (35-36; italics added). Breton’s reading, to put it plainly, purports to be an archaeological discovery on the order of a transitional fossil that exposes the apostolic origin of the last two millennia of Western philosophy—and, at the same time, the philosophical origin of the last two millennia of Christian theology and practice.

The first chapter, “Biographical Outline,” focuses on the making of this long sought after “missing link,” the philosopher/apostle Paul. Focusing on the “rhapsodic data” of Acts and the assorted letters, Breton attempts to reconstruct Paul according to his own “autobiographical confessions” (37). Two decisive events present themselves for close inspection: Paul’s so-called conversion on the road to Damascus and the Jerusalem assembly. The Damascus experience is a reorientation rather than a revocation of Paul’s militant passion, a “rupture” that, with its implications of eternity, transcends itself as a mere temporal marker. The function of the Damascus experience in the Pauline autobiographical confessions is to bear witness to a “primary difference” between one’s earthly calling and the impossible-to-articulate splendor of one’s preexisting essence (39).  The Jerusalem assembly is a similarly decisive, even “paradigmatic,” event in Paul’s life, which, though he would later reject the validity of the council’s provisionary synthesis, recognized his divinely ordained mission and provided him with an objective framework with which to respond to his opponents (40-41).

For all their decisiveness, what these two events fundamentally have in common is their divisiveness. According to Breton, they open a “schizoid” fracture between “before” and “after,” a lapse or caesura in Paul’s identity that must be attended to for the sake of the efficacy of his mission and for his own psychological stability (46). Paul is left with two options: either accept the collapse into an irresolvable dualism or commit to a fragile yoking together of past and present, a fabricated sense of continuity that retains the essential lacuna between the Old and the New but remedies its destabilizing effects (47). Breton’s interpretation of Paul’s “conversion” is, of course, easily challenged by the contemporary reader, such that it is unnecessary to rehearse the relevant insights afforded by both secular and theological studies of the Apostle that seek to affirm the apostle’s Jewishness against centuries of anti-Semitic histories. It is therefore disappointing that resolving this contentious tension becomes, for Breton, the central motivation of Paul’s mission. However, following Blanton’s skillful reading of Strauss, one should interrogate Breton’s text not just for the veracity of its arguments but to search for clues about the primary social and technological conflicts that find their way into his writing.

September 13, 2012

The Spectralization of Paul (Part 4)


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.

September 12, 2012

The Spectralization of Paul (Part 3)


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.

September 11, 2012

The Spectralization of Paul (Part 2)


II.1
Blanton’s Displacing Christian Origins

In the context of the veritable discursive explosion among contemporary continental philosophers on the topic of early Christianity (especially of the Pauline variety), Blanton’s published dissertation, Displacing Christian Origins: Philosophy, Secularity, and the New Testament, investigates the agonistic relationship between critical New Testament scholarship and philosophy. Drawing parallels between the current disciplinary struggles and those of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Blanton argues that “a given depiction of earliest Christian religion may…be read as a struggle between philosophy and New Testament studies to secure a kind of disciplinary ownership of the early Christian legacy by declaring its own realm of thinking to promise a superior mode of access to primordial or original Christianity” (5). Following this realization, Blanton wishes to establish nineteenth and twentieth century “media environments” as a crucial topic for further research that will discuss the machinistic reconstitution of religion following revolutionary technological inventions (14). Blanton sketches out the territory with his skillful and inspired readings of both philosophers, biblical critics, and those who straddled the boundaries—Hegel, Strauss, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Deissmann, and Schweitzer.

Blanton most effectively synthesizes his diverse research interests in the first two chapters, which provide a detailed account of the overtly Hegelian scholarship of David Friedrich Strauss. Strauss’s struggle to constitute himself as a thoroughly modern recipient of Enlightenment rationality manifested itself in the “secularizing” and “profaning” effects of his biblical scholarship (25). Consequently, Strauss’s biblical scholarship was an open attempt to expand the porous gap between the non-modern world of the New Testament and his own Hegelian conception of modernity. To complicate matters, Blanton asks the reader to consider Strauss’s struggle for modernity as a pseudo-Pauline struggle between the dead letter of the Bible and the life-breathing Spirit promised by mass printing (71). For Strauss, mass printing, especially in the form of the newspaper industry, provided the technological means for immediate connection, which he opposed to the corporate non-authorship of the “foreign” biblical text (85).

“Authorship” is a guiding question for Strauss, and it becomes a guiding question for Blanton as well, who magnifies the quest for the author as a kind of doomed quest for modern integrity in the work of Strauss, Nietzsche, and, later, Deissmann and Heidegger. Though contemporary philosophical readings of Paul, having passed through the death of the author, seem to focus on the meaning of community and identity in the context of world capitalism, Blanton shows that the (absent) author was central to the debates of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is therefore no surprise that Strauss, for whom the mass printing and newspaper industry were heralds of a thoroughly modern and thoroughly secular community, attempts to demystify the Bible by beginning with an investigation into its (often quite dubious) textual origins; nor is it particularly surprising that Nietzsche, in his rebuttal to Strauss, would also evoke the notion of authorship to upbraid Strauss for his misplaced faith in the newspaper. Blanton writes, “Nietzsche perceived the paradoxical connection between Strauss’s obsession with the newspaper as a secularizing, enlightening force and Strauss’s kerygmatic announcements of this secular community to come as a new (and industrially produced) mythology” (103). For Nietzsche, this new mythology posed a significant threat to the entire notion of literary authorship and modern individuality (101), the loss of which would signal the extinction of the so-called “German spirit” (81).

September 10, 2012

The Spectralization of Paul (Part 1)

[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.

September 5, 2012

Thoughts on Colorblindness

I am colorblind.

For me, neither color nor the absence of color exists; for me, nothing but color and its absence exists.

I discovered that I was "afflicted" with this "condition" (which I inherited from my grandfather by way of my mother) rather late, at 16 to be precise, on a dead day in biology class. Our instructor, having exhausted his lesson plans for the semester, displayed the first of a number of tests used to befuddle those of us who were born with the incorrect allotment of retinal cones. There were those who saw a certain number, say 13, and there was me—I who saw a random cluster of dots in a circle with no discernible pattern.

"You are colorblind," the teacher said, pleased with himself and his little experiment, grinning the ridiculous, slightly sadistic grin of a vindicated high school instructor. This was, I suppose, the extent of his authority and power over me: to tell me that my experience of color has been, up to this point, almost completely false. So he had every right to feel vindicated, I suppose. But partial colorblindness is not uncommon, in fact. Roughly 10% of males are at least partially colorblind, so of course it stands to reason that at least one student in an introductory biology class in high school would fail at least one or two of the color wheel tests; most of us never learn that we a colorblind, however.

How absurd! Most people who are colorblind don’t even know it! I sometimes wonder if this fact comes as a disappointment to color-seeing people—people who have every reason to believe that they can see every color. After all, it takes the concentrated intervention of a "normal" person who can devise a way to test for lack to tell us that we cannot experience the beauty of the spectrum, or at least not in the "correct and true" way of the majority of humans. If it weren’t for such efforts on my behalf, I wouldn’t even know what I was missing when I look at a rainbow, or the laughable version of a rainbow that I see. (Of course, even though I know that I’m missing something, I still don’t know what it is I’m missing, and I can’t know. So actually, I’m no better off. Sorry!)

The inability to see color, even in the perfect light of day, is not experienced as deprivation to me (despite the occasional difficulty with reading a color-coded roadmap or something like that). This is because color and its absence exist for me, as with other colorblind people, purely as a function of language; even though I have never seen the color green, for instance, I still have a linguistic concept of the word "green." That is to say, I still experience the color discursively, which is also the only way I can experience the absence of this color.

With everyone, it’s the same. Words entrench the color into us, we entrench the colors into words. When I was young, therefore, before I knew that I could not see color, I was taught how to describe things by their color: The sky is blue; it is sky-blue. Water, at a distance, is blue, too, but up close, water is clear. These flowers are red. This shirt is yellow. Those shoes are brown. And so on until every object and phenomenon was classified according to the possible spectrum.

And after I learned that I cannot see color, I had to learn that the blue I have seen is not blue, that likewise yellow is not yellow, that I have mixed this blue that is not blue with this yellow that is not yellow to produce a green that is not green. And so on until every object and phenomenon was declassified according to an impossible spectrum.

So I’m actually quite thankful I found out I am colorblind, that there are (according to several reliable sources) several colors I can’t see and never will. This "condition" or "affliction" has given me the gift of rethinking the world we are made to experience through words—the world of the words and the words of the world, the innerworld the words create and the outerworld the words signify and the implacable threads of conditioning that run through them. Colorblindness has created in me the possibility of interiority that is both the irrevocable product of language and a place utterly protected from our words, concepts, and distinctions—a place where language turns in on itself and experience dissolves into the words that constitute it.

I’m also left handed, but that’s another story altogether.

August 26, 2012

September 3, 2012

Music journal, 7-8/2012


July/August

July 2. Vijay Iyer Trio: Accelerando. Turning out roughly an album a year means that Iyer usually gets to include a few choice covers each time. This time, FlyLo’s “MmmHmm” (!) and MJ’s “Human Nature” get Iyer’s oblique treatment, along with remakes of Sir Duke, Herbie Nichols, and others. The originals are grandly expansive despite their relatively short runtimes, yet they retain the distance and complex opacity of Iyer’s best song-puzzles. But Accelerando is above all a groove affair; and the interplay of the trio consistently demands more attention than the compositions themselves.

July 4. Laurel Halo: Quarantine. An elusive, alluring voice undergirded and, perhaps, overdetermined by hazy synth washes and woozy indie-electro and tribal-sounding beats. The album cover, a surreal and disturbing image that looks ripped from a particularly gruesome manga, perfectly evokes the disoriented woundedness and science-fictional neuroses of the songs themselves. What we hear on this album is a rare instance of an artist emerging self-conscious enough to make un-self-conscious music, living in and speaking honestly about the concealed contradictions of our violent, damaged life in advanced capitalism. From here, as someone once said, we go sublime.

July 4. Lapalux: When You’re Gone. A downcast, depressive mini-LP that foregrounds the substantial influence Burial and, more recently, James Blake have had on the Brainfeeder roster. For such forward-thinking music to bring to me so clearly the experience of nostalgia is a contradiction I’ll just have to learn to live with. “Gutter Glitter” and “Gone” are particularly eyebrow-raising.

July 6. Mount Eerie: Clear Moon. Phil Elverum’s musings on nature have shifted over his career from the earlier Microphones albums that offered wide-eyed paeans to earth and water and fire to his more recent releases, in which, still enraptured, he comes to appreciate the raw, destructive power of nature as embodied by those same classical elements. Clear Moon (forthcoming sequel: Ocean Roar) naturally shares a fair amount of intertext with previous releases, especially since he’s still inhabiting the “raw impermanence” (key lyrical phrase) mode of Wind’s Poem.

July 30. The Walkmen: Heaven. OK, I admit it: the main reason I listened to this album is because Laszlo Krasznahorkai said he’d been listening to it. After listening to this and then turning toward a couple of their previous albums, it seems to me that Heaven is one of their lighter works, capturing as it does the band trying to do the Fleet Foxes thing (the album even features that band’s lead singer on a few tracks).

July 31. Yosi Horikawa: Wandering. Here is an electronic composer whose impeccable sense of rhythm is matched by equally important senses of humor, harmony, and aesthetics. Wandering is an intriguing and, in the right conditions, transfixing collage of beats and found sounds, playfully arranged into four intelligent and (here’s the thing) distinct and memorable compositions. Its 18 minutes are far too brief, so I attached “Desert” and “Passed By” from this year’s Layer Forest 2 comp, the gorgeous remix of Uma’s “Drop Your Soul,” and, why not, 2009’s jazzier mini-LP Touch for the perfect length.

August 1. Ty Segall: Hair (with White Fence) and Slaughterhouse. Of the two releases curated by Segall this year, Slaughterhouse (credited to the Ty Segall Band—and boy does having a band make a difference) contains the best songs and performances, along with, for good measure, a hilarious, self-destructing cover of “Diddy Wah Diddy” (“Fuck this fucking song! I don’t know what we’re doing!”), and a gripping 10-minute conclusion of amplifier worship called “Fuzz War.” Total death drive going on there. On Hair, Segall lets down his, erm, hair, and indulges in a few somewhat psychedelic, definitely druggy songs with White Fence. [MARGINALIA, August 1: A third album (!), completely solo this time, Twins, is projected for later this year. Apparently it’s going to be the logical continuation of last year’s Goodbye Bread, which I found much less interesting than these two.]

August 7. Ryat: Totem. A fairly nondescript piece of multi-instrumentalist, experimental electronica in the vein of James Blake. The voice and lyrics, which might at first appear to be the compositional core, are inconsequential and often self-sampled, so they make much less of an impact than the mix of skippy beats and live instrumentation.

August 12. Himuro Yoshiteru: Our Turn, Anytime. A whimsical smorgasbord of gyrating ideas in various states of generic collision, with jazz inflected IDM like “Night Shift” hardly containing itself before spiraling into the jumbled cartridge aesthetic of tracks like “Bending Out.” Himuro’s parade of masks ensures that the collection of songs does not cohere as an album, though Our Turn stands out as one of the more exuberant electronic releases of 2012.

August 13. Dan Deacon: America. Let this be cause to pause for thought: On the surface, Dan Deacon’s America of 2012 would appear to have little in common with John Fahey’s America from way back in 1971—beyond, of course, purporting to represent the cultural contradictions of the country in a given historical moment in a predominantly instrumental format. But just as Fahey’s album takes its cue from Mark 1:15 (perhaps the paradigmatic apocalyptic announcement of early Christian literature), so does Deacon’s work constantly adopt the apocalyptic mode of signification, albeit in a more openly celebratory way. This is certainly the case in the 4-part suite that closes Deacon’s album, one of his finest compositions (especially considered next to the less enthralling first half of the album).

August 13. Cicada: Let’s Go. A too-brief (but not fragmentary) collection of nine delicate post-rock, post-classical, post-whatever compositions by a piano-based, all-female group from Taiwan. Tonally and compositionally mature, the precedent would seem to be the ruminative, abstractly melodic minimalist chamber folk music of the Penguin Café Orchestra. This is some truly lovely stuff that deserves to be heard by way more people than who will hear it this year.

August 15. Dirty Projectors: Swing Low Magellan. The occasionally beautiful vocal harmonies help to obscure the more general climate of an exhausted imagination.

August 15. Zammuto: Zammuto. Zammuto, zammuto of the zammuto-zammuto Zammuto, zammutoes this zammuto.

August 17. Actress: RIP. Electronic music with an essential layer or two stripped away, signifying not so much gentleness or minimalism-in-practice—much less “R&B concrete,” a clever discursive gesture at most—but a fragmentary, disintegrated clamor.

August 17. Saint Etienne: Words and Music by Saint Etienne. From the opening monologue to the last call of “Haunted Jukebox,” Saint Etienne’s first substantial work since 2005 is a love letter to music, set to music. Très nostalgique, oui, but somehow the almost total lack of irony makes the album that much more compelling and endearing.

August 20. Spoek Mathambo: Father Creeper. The natural counterpoint of the escapist electro-hip-hop beats and the throwaway lyrics that address the luxurious (decadent) life of a somewhat famous music star is a second, more painful and articulate set of music and lyrics that bears witness to a haunted soul and a body inscribed by the horror of apartheid and poverty. The latter gives the necessary historical grounding to the former, while the former probably has to be there to ensure that someone will listen.