Specters of Paul: Sexual Difference in Early Christian Thought

Introduction: Sexual Difference and Paul’s Adam-Christ Typology

I n t r o d u c t i o n Sexual Difference and Paul’s Adam-Christ Typology One of the central games of life in most cultures is the gender game, or more specifically the multiplicity of gender games available in that time and place. The effort to understand the making and unmaking of gender, as well as what gender makes, involves understanding the workings of these games as games, with their inclusions and exclusions, multiple positions, complex rules, forms of bodily activity, structures of feeling and desire, and stakes of winning, losing, or simply playing. It involves as well the question of how gender games collide with, encompass, or are bent to the service of, other games, for gender is never, as they say, the only game in town. —Sherry Ortner, Making Gender Sexual difference is the site where a question concerning the relation of the biological to the cultural is posed and reposed, where it must and can be posed, but where it cannot, strictly speaking, be answered. —Judith Butler, Undoing Gender French philosopher Alain Badiou opens a manifesto on his theory of the subject with the question, “Why Saint Paul? Why solicit this ‘apostle’ who is all the more suspect for having, it seems, proclaimed himself such and whose name is frequently tied to Christianity’s least open, most institutional aspects: the Church, moral discipline, social conservatism, suspiciousness towards Jews?”1 Nevertheless, Badiou does solicit Paul, even going so far as to christen 2 Introduction him “our contemporary.” On this point Badiou is not alone; he participates in a broader resurgence of interest in the apostle among continental philosophers and critical theorists.2 The figure of Paul, it appears, has emerged (or reemerged) at the forefront of critical thought regarding questions of human subjectivity and political action. Still, why Paul? Or, as Badiou asks, “What does Paul want?”3 And what does it have to do with us? Paul’s proclamation of the Christ event has always lent itself to multiple interpretations—and the current philosophical conversation is no exception. For Badiou (and for another prominent continental philosopher, Slavoj Žižek), the apostle announces a universalizing operation whereby truth emerges by radically subtracting itself from the differences of ethnicity, culture, and sex/sexuality.4 In contrast, numerous historians of the New Testament have firmly maintained that Paul envisions not a universalizing subtraction, but rather a historically and culturally specific “grafting” of the non-Jewish nations of the world onto God’s chosen “tree,” the people of Israel.5 In this way, he does not efface Israel’s ethnic particularity or cause it to become inoperative, but instead declares a way for Gentiles to be included in God’s promise of faithfulness to Israel. Regardless how one settles this debate, these two divergent readings of Paul are both attended by ghosts—haunting figures that are specific to the readings’ respective claims and that have proven stubbornly persistent. Surveying the contemporary intellectual field of Pauline interpretation, John Caputo elucidates this point well: “Down each road lies an ominous specter. Down the one, the extra ecclesiam nullus salus est, the work of the militant missionary who wants to convert everyone to the religion of Israel, now fulfilled in Christ, which requires a work of global missionary conversion, of world Christianization . Down the other, the specter of the militant revolutionary ready to spill blood on behalf of his view of what the universal is.”6 Neither of these specters generated by the Pauline text can be sequestered safely in the ancient past. Rather, they continue to press upon generations of the apostle’s interpreters all the way down to us—as the contemporary philosophical interest in Paul demonstrates . Caputo notes that for Badiou and Žižek “the fear of these specters [is] a fear of truth . . . the product of what they consider a timid postmodern pluralism.”7 For these philosophers, then, the fear in question needs to be overcome by pursuing some definitive (if as yet unarticulated) resolution to the ongoing difficulties that the specters pose. Yet I want to suggest that this dimension of Pauline “spectrality” may in fact point in another direction, re- flecting some constitutive instability at the heart of Paul’s project that resists any final resolution. Sexual Difference and Paul's Typology 3 At stake here is the larger problem...