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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.