St. Paul among the Philosophers

Introduction Postcards from Paul: Subtraction versus Grafting

1 Introduction Postcards from Paul: Subtraction versus Grafting John D. Caputo “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female” (Gal 3:28). As Paula Fredriksen says in the roundtable included in this volume, that is a great sound bite. That is exactly what we want St. Paul to say, we being contemporary democratic, fair-minded pluralists . Viewed more closely, however, Fredriksen adds, Paul was nothing of the sort. He did not affirm the alterity and diversity of Mediterranean culture. He took it for a culture of idol worshipers who, as Fredriksen puts it, “were going to fry.” That particularly colorful excerpt from the conversation that took place at Syracuse University in April 2005 is a good example of the sort of problem posed by the contemporary interest shown by secular philosophers in St. Paul. It points out the difficulties encountered in the exchange between the systematizers (philosophers but also the theologians) who want to put Paul to a contemporary purpose and the historians who are interested in reconstituting the original context of Paul’s work. They are brought together in the present volume. Is the proper work of reading to reconstitute what the original author said to the original audience? Or it is to retrieve something implied, implicit, a tendency that is possible, repressed, but astir in the text and thus gives the text a history, a future? The name of a thinker—here “Paul”—is the name of a matter to be thought (eine Sache des Denkens), as Heidegger famously said. Or is it better to concede that reading is one thing and thinking another? If, as one is likely to say when faced with such a choice, we want to engage in a bit of both, how then is the one related to the other? What limits does the actual context put on our right to say that Paul says this or that? In The Postcard Derrida defended the structural possibility of lost mail. By this he 2 · John D. Caputo meant not only that a letter can be lost or damaged in the mail, which has certainly been the fate with most of Paul’s letters, but that even if it is sent and received it may always be misunderstood, which has also happened to Paul, and beyond that even if it is sent, received, and interpreted in terms of its original context, to the extent that is possible, it is always structurally possible to understand it differently, to recontextualize it. But is there no limit to this? Can any constraints be set in advance to understanding differently? In this volume we focus on the work of Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, who (along with Georgio Agamben) are at the center of the current retrieval of Paul. These are secular philosophers who pointedly do not share Paul’s core beliefintheresurrectionofChristbutregardhisprojectascentrallyimportant for contemporary political life and reflection. The Pauline project, as they see it,istheuniversalityoftruth,theconviction(pistis)thatwhatistrueistruefor everyone and that the proper role of the subject is to make that truth known, to fight the good fight on behalf of the truth, to all the ends of the earth (apostolos ). They have in mind the dramatic conversion of Paul—the event!—and Paul’s subsequent dispute with the leaders of the early Jewish Christian community in Jerusalem that Christ belongs to all, that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, master nor slave, and the militant vigor with whichPaulpromulgatedthatbeliefacrossAsiaMinor.InPaul’sview,onedoes not need to be a Jew or first become one in order to receive the word of the gospel.Thehistoriansinthisvolumeagreethatwhilethisistrueenough,what Paul had in mind was that the gentiles would finally be “grafted” onto “the tree of Israel,” that Christ is the fulfillment of a specifically Jewish promise, not a Greek one. “Remember that it is not you [the gentiles] that support the root [Israel] but the root that supports you” (Rom 11:18). What Paul is saying is analogous to saying that Buddhism belongs to all, that in the Buddha there is neither Greek nor Jew, that we are all to be grafted onto the Bodhi tree. Thus we may take the Pauline project in two different directions. On the one hand, there is Badiou’s more formalizing method of “subtraction,” that the poweroftruthistosubtractitselffromorannullocaldifferencesoridentitiesin order to announce and then implement a true universal where there is neither Greek nor Jew. On the other hand, there is...