Pauline Ugliness

Jacob Taubes and the Turn to Paul

Ole Jakob Løland

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780823286560
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

In recent decades Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Žižek have shown the centrality of Paul to western political and philosophical thought and made the Apostle a central figure in left-wing discourses far removed from traditional theological circles. Yet the recovery of Paul beyond Christian theology owes a great deal to the writings of the Jewish rabbi and philosopher Jacob Taubes (1923–1987). Pauline Ugliness shows how Paul became an effective tool for Taubes to position himself within European philosophical debates of the twentieth century. Drawing on Nietzsche's polemical readings of the ancient apostle as well as Freud's psychoanalysis, Taubes developed an imaginative and distinct account of political theology in confrontations with Carl Schmitt, Theodor Adorno, Hans Blumenberg, and others. In a powerful reconsideration of the apostle, Taubes contested the conventional understanding of Paul as the first Christian who broke definitively with Judaism and drained Christianity of its political potential. As a Jewish rabbi steeped in a philosophical tradition marked by European Christianity, Taubes was, on the contrary, able to emphasize Paul's Jewishness as well as the political explosiveness of his revolutionary doctrine of the cross.This book establishes Taubes's account of Paul as a turning point in the development of political theology. Løland shows how Taubes identified the Pauline movement as the birth of a politics of ugliness, the invention of a revolutionary criticism of the 'beautiful' culture of the powerful that sides instead with the oppressed.

1

The Historical and the Philosophical

A Contemporary Scene

If reception history is “all that ever existed,” in the words of Brennan W. Breed,¹ the difference between readings that rely on history and those that rely on philosophy is not that clear-cut. If we cannot identify definitive boundaries between the original text and its reception, between production and interpretation, the opposition between a historical and a philosophical approach becomes more unstable and problematic. With this in mind the inside and outside of a biblical text is shaken, and the clear dichotomy between exegesis and eisegesis is rendered unsustainable, since the difference between text and reader is not easily drawn.²

Nevertheless, assumptions that such disciplinary boundaries can and indeed should be drawn have guided recent discussions on the philosophers’ readings of Paul. We may isolate a scene where the view of the philosophical and the historical as irreconcilable entities were reproduced and made an impact on these discussions. This scene is from the 2005 conference at Syracuse University in the United States on April 14–16, documented in St. Paul among the Philosophers (2009). Taubes was not a theme during this conference. Badiou and Žižek, however, were among its participants.

Setting the Scene

For this meeting, Linda Martín Alcoff and John D. Caputo gathered philosophers and biblical scholars to discuss Paul. The biblical scholar Paula Fredriksen responded to what she termed the philosopher’s “sense of discovery” of Paul as “our contemporary,” this latter expression being one of her only two quotations from the philosophers, in this case Alain Badiou.³

On the one hand, Fredriksen’s two short quotes are representative of the degree of engagement between the two camps of academicians. No wonder then that what struck commentators on this published conference in retrospect was the lack of engagement across these disciplinary formations that are delineated by the nouns “history” and “philosophy.”⁴ The conversations documented in St. Paul among the Philosophers were indications of failed encounters or missed opportunities to go into dialogue, though with some very important exceptions.⁵

On the other hand, Paula Fredriksen’s response almost amounted to an argument for the necessity of not engaging. Badiou’s position of Paul as “our contemporary” was not to be discussed by Fredriksen, but rather declared to be an unacceptable position from a strictly historical point of view. As the title of her paper indicated, Badiou’s reading of Paul was the result of an “interpretative freedom,” as if this freedom were something in which only philosophers like Badiou could indulge. The contrast to this unrestrained philosophical pleasure was described by another participant at the conference, the Pauline scholar Dale Martin, as “the ascetic point of view of modern historical criticism.” This potentially self-critical description of the historians’ mode of reading was in Fredrikson’s words branded as “historical integrity.” This integrity was to be achieved through avoiding the pitfall of an anachronistic reading, which Badiou had run into through his discovery of Paul, his closing of “cultural gaps,” according to Fredriksen:

The frame of reference for historical interpretation is not and cannot be the present. To do history requires acknowledging difference between us and the objects of our inquiry. Historical interpretation proceeds by acceding to the priority of the ancient context. Our frame of reference is the past. In our particular instance, this morning, for example, my question is not, What does Paul mean? that is, to us. Rather, I ask, What did Paul mean? that is, to his first-century contemporaries.… They, not we, were the audience of his message. He was obliged to be intelligible not to us but to them.⁶

The demarcations between the science that cultivates the virtue of “historical integrity” and the one that reads texts from the past with “interpretive freedom” are presented as clear-cut: past versus present, what an author meant versus what an author means, them versus us.⁷ Fredriksen then proceeds in her paper to warn the philosophers, it appears, that the intelligibility with which Paul met his ancient audience was “alarmingly elusive,” since “consistency does not rank among Paul’s strong suits.”⁸ Accordingly, one might add another binary constituting the division of labor between historians with “integrity” and philosophers with “freedom”: while historians reveal the author’s inconsistencies, philosophers read the same author as consistent, systematizing this author’s thought. In Fredriksen’s words, “Coherence often has to be distilled or imposed.”⁹

Processes of Outbidding

These demarcations are not drawn in a vacuum, devoid of powers and struggles. Neither do they represent something radically new. They should rather be characterized as reactions that occur as the result of an interdisciplinary tension, a new mode of what Immanuel Kant in his days described in The Conflict of the Faculties, a conflict that needed wise negotiators in order to secure a proper role for reason itself. Though the demarcations between the historical and the philosophical are set along other lines than in Kant’s days, there is still an unresolved conflict over the right of ownership to the correct understanding of scripture, of Christianity in relation to modern reason, which is played out in academic debates with such regularity as to be labeled a “small discursive machine.”¹⁰

In Displacing Christian Origins Ward Blanton performs an intriguing comparison of Derrida’s depiction in this essay to a process of outbidding. While Derrida points to the repeated efforts of modern philosophy to separate itself from religion as pure, secular reason, Blanton gives Derrida’s thesis an added force when he applies it to modern biblical scholarship. Not only did this manifestation of modern thought produce its knowledge in interaction and dialogue with the named modern philosophers, but modern biblical scholarship was also in the search for the “origins” of religion, in particular, of Christianity, relying on and further developing distinctions between religion and secular reason. It also had to trust, to believe, or to “gamble.” As Blanton states:

With the insertion of New Testament historiography into the self-transcending economy of modern thought, we immediately double the modes of originariness in view because we double the academic modes in which such gambles to outbid Christianity may be performed.¹¹

Paula Fredrikson’s stark lines of demarcation between the modes of reading that manifest “historical integrity” and those (like Badiou’s) that do not may be regarded as automated productions of Derrida’s little machine. Fredrikson’s superior version of understanding of this author, this historical person called “Paul,” serves the purpose in this discussion of outdoing the other—namely, Badiou’s Paul. This “philosophical” Paul is not discerned within what are here regarded as the (or Fredriksen’s) limits of historical reason alone. E. P. Sanders’s apparent ignorance of or minimal attention toward the philosophers’ work on the same occasion might as well be interpreted as a confirmation of this logic of outbidding, rather than just “historical integrity” or “interpretive humility.”¹² As Blanton observes, apropos these gestures of apparently not succumbing to normatively laden debates about the meaning of “Paul” in our contemporary situation, the prevailing attitude among New Testament historians to claim cultural relativism for their work does not constitute radicalism in today’s academy:

Far from being radical statements, such confessions (despite their apparent humility) are … little more than dogmatisms, and they will not be otherwise as long as scholars are declaring the historicity of their thinking without being able to articulate much about how this thinking participates in the various types of contingency of what genuinely viable alternatives might be available to these forms of analysis.¹³

In this intensified conflict between the faculties of history and philosophy over the ownership of the name “Paul,” the philosophers are by no means left unscathed or saved from this process of outbidding. In their declared resistance to “historicism” or their critique of the traditional churches’ failure to realize and fulfill Christianity’s secular meaning, they are not innocent of exercises of superiority. These are philosophers who have the capacity to “extract a formal, wholly secularized conception of grace from the mythological core,”¹⁴ in the words of Badiou. Or as Žižek puts it, “The subversive kernel of Christianity … is accessible only to a materialist approach.”¹⁵ They have surely announced their own bid in this never-ending spiral of outbidding. The philosophers, like the historians, participate in this “competitive play of images between these disciplines.”¹⁶

It is not only that the two groups of academicians participate in the same sort of logic, described by Derrida and Blanton, when they expose their disagreements over the meaning of the Pauline legacy. It might also be the case that the reason for talking past each other is that both parties lack what Blanton is aiming at in his investigation of the production of modern New Testament scholarship in interaction with modern philosophy. Blanton’s declared aim is a deeper historicity that might enable the parties at both sides of this division of academic labor “to articulate much about how this thinking participates in the various types of contingency.”¹⁷ In this process scholars will hopefully be able to attain a higher degree of disciplinary memory, of how modern biblical scholarship shaped modern philosophy and vice versa. But we may also get a clearer view of what Blanton has labeled “the excessive nature” of “both the formal, abstract categories of philosophy and the empirical or historical descriptions of New Testament historiography.”¹⁸ For as Blanton underlines, each field borrows from the other. At the same time as he evokes a disciplinary memory from the past through the analyses in Displacing Christian Origins, Blanton points to the inescapably blurred distinctions and unstable oppositions between history and philosophy in the present. Neither camp has ceased to borrow, as if they were now “pure” disciplines, with a historical method safeguarded against any “speculation” or a philosophical undertaking protected at the outset against any kind of “historicism.”

Precisely because there is an intensified interdisciplinary conflict surrounding the name “Paul” and because this competitive play of images is taking place in the activation of the Pauline legacy, one would expect to find traces of this disciplinary contest at work in the philosophers’ readings of Paul. In isolating “historical” and “philosophical” aspects of this reading, in order to see the competitive play more clearly, it is crucial to have Blanton’s warning in mind concerning “the excessive nature” of the opposition, the difference between these two “origins” or “sources” for reading: history and philosophy. There may also be a danger of privileging the one over the other in terms of epistemology instead of paying close attention to how these “abstract” forces of “history” and “philosophy” are operating in the readings of Paul. This requires the isolation of aspects of these readings as “philosophical” and “historical.” For heuristic purposes, then, it will be necessary to work within this opposition without believing too much in its dichotomy or stability without forgetting that ultimately this dichotomy’s contrast makes only limited sense.

Taubes: The Disciplinary Disaster

When Jacob Taubes introduces his lectures on Paul’s letter to the Romans, he emphasizes the place at which he is speaking. He speaks as if he is not only addressing himself to a specific audience, but is also confronting a scholarly tradition with his reading of the Romans, which amounts to a “monstrous task”:

To broach this Epistle is a monstrous task. Just as, in general, this conference is not lacking in monstrosities. Here I am in Heidelberg, which is the city of Martin Dibelius, of Günther Bornkamm, of Gerd Theissen and other New Testament scholars. What am I doing, carrying coals to Heidelberg?¹⁹

It is as if Taubes anticipates an imagined reaction from his audience,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The Historical and the Philosophical: A Contemporary Scene
• 2. Jacob Taubes’s Path to Paul: From the Eschatologist to the Paulinist
• 3. Paul and Philosophy: Taubes’s Contradictory Paul
• 4. Paul as Predecessor to Psychoanalysis: Taubes’s Introspective Paul
• 5. Paul against Empire: Taubes’s Political Paul
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of Biblical References
• General Index
• About the Author
• Series List