Saint Paul: Friend of Derrida?

Contemporary intellectuals interested in progressive and even militantly leftist possibilities within religious thought have turned increasingly to the letters of Saint Paul. Should one concede Paul—himself a notable casualty of Empire—to the Right, whether it take the form of theocratic boosters of a global Pax Americana or any other? Paul’s letters have thus become a crucial site for a political renegotiation of religion that has opened new paths of inquiry for thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Žižek. All three have engaged with Paul in order to reformulate and to extend abiding political and theoretical concerns. Agamben argues that Walter Benjamin’s allusions to Paul’s letters signal a vital relation between Benjamin’s and Paul’s respective understandings of messianic time: a Benjaminian Paul becomes newly readable as addressing how one lives life in the state of exception. For Badiou, Paul emerges as “a poet-thinker of the event” (2). Paul’s uncompromising fidelity to the “Christ-event” and his articulation of the “discourse of truth” that the event underwrites makes Paul the template “for a new militant figure” (23, 6, 2). And, in league with Badiou, Žižek finds in Paul “an engaged position of struggle, an uncanny ‘interpellation’ beyond ideological interpellation” that cuts through liberal multiculturalism, pragmatic reformism, and desire stalled in transgression to allow for a “community (or, rather, collective) of believers” that is “held together not by a Master Signifier, but by fidelity to a Cause” (112, 138, 130).

Equally important to this turn to religion is Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, a text that worked to reassess Marx’s judgment of religious belief as ideology, and that has thus played an important role in the “return” of some on the academic left to religion. Indeed, over the last decade and a half, Derrida has intensively queried religion and religious texts, arguing that any renewed left project must come to terms with both the messianic promise implicit in Marx and the autoimmune complications of the messianic in the Judaic, Christian, and Islamic traditions. Yet, unlike Agamben, Badiou, and Žižek, Derrida refrains from offering either an explicit re-evaluation of Paul’s letters or an endorsement of a “left” Paul. On the contrary, Derrida directly aligns Paul’s discourse on veiling and unveiling with the history of “truth as onto-logical revelation” that Derrida works to transcend (“Silkworm” 83). Given Derrida’s relative reserve on the subject, is a rapprochement between Paul and Derrida conceivable? Are there Pauline aspects to Derrida’s texts and deconstructive logistics available in Paul’s letters? Should we add Derrida to the growing list of thinkers for whom Paul is a political friend?

Theodore W. Jennings’s Reading Derrida/Thinking Paul: On Justice works to answer just such questions. Jennings wants to show how Derrida’s writings can illuminate Paul’s Letter to the Romans and, more specifically, the apostle’s various claims about justice. Jennings argues that Derrida and Paul resonate intriguingly with one another because both share a passion for justice and for thinking through the various aporias that the pursuit of justice entails. Jennings’s chapters juxtapose Paul and Derrida on law, violence, gift, faith, hospitality, and pardon in order to make sense of that resonance.

Jennings convincingly elaborates a number of striking parallels between Paul and Derrida. For instance, Jennings argues that Derrida’s claims in “The Force of Law” about the ways in which justice necessarily exceeds law give us a new way to understand Paul’s distinction in Romans between law and justice. For Derrida, justice exceeds law as law’s condition of (im)possibility; Jennings reads Paul as relating law to justice in a similar manner. This reading brings Paul much closer to Derrida’s focus on justice as a crucially political question.

The English-language tradition of theological commentary on Romans tends to understand Paul as concerned with a personal, moral uprightness as opposed to politics as such. To loosen this tradition’s hold, Jennings argues that while the...