Abstract
Paul the Apostle is useful for Žižek’s imaginations of a rupture with the status quo. Informed by the Augustinian-Lutheran paradigm, Žižek constructs the image of Paul as an antinomian that can be used to criticize and resist Law in its psychoanalytical as well as political dimensions. While these disruptive energies released through Žižek and other readers in the history of interpretation of the Pauline corpus point to potential meanings of the apostle’s texts, the very same texts also have the capacity to build less antinomian and more wary forms of messianism, reflected in a less revolutionary and more pragmatic politics that reflects a Pauline valorization of law and its purpose: Justice.
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- 1.
Caputo and Alcoff, 178.
- 2.
Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, 66.
- 3.
Žižek quotes Nancy in Žižek, Milbank, and Davis, 287.
- 4.
Welborn, “The Culture of Crucifixion”, 137.
- 5.
“There is a moment, however, when in my view one must reengage negotiation; it is political or, let us say, historical concern. It is that if one holds this alterity without alteration in pure respect, one always risks lending a hand to immobolism, conservatism, etc., that is, to the very effacement of alterity itself.” Derrida quoted in Jill Robbins, Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
- 6.
Roland Boer, Political Myth: On the Use and Abuse of Biblical Themes (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). Pound, Žižek: A (Very) Critical Introduction; “The Assumption of Desire: Kierkegaard, Lacan, and the Trauma of the Eucharist”.
- 7.
Segundo quoted in Jon Sobrino, Jesus the Liberator: A Historical-Theological Reading of Jesus of Nazareth (Tunbridge Wells: Burns & Oates, 1994), 181.
- 8.
Žižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, 82.
- 9.
Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London; New York: Routledge, 2005), 6.
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Løland, O.J. (2018). Conclusion: The Usefulness of Pauline Texts for the Philosopher—And for the Theologian. In: The Reception of Paul the Apostle in the Works of Slavoj Žižek. Radical Theologies and Philosophies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91728-3_6
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