Religious Suspension of the Theological

Abstract

It is crucial to understand Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew: as a “transformation of a biblical text into a filmic medium.” In this first instance of analysis, there is an encounter of an analogy between Althusser and Pasolini. In the previous chapter, I argued that Althusser’s entire philosophical project can be described as an attempt to return to Marx. In this sense, the first line of comparison to be drawn with Pasolini is that his The Gospel According to St. Matthew should be read as the “return to Jesus Christ.” Althusser’s return to Marx took the form of a philosophical reading of (particularly) Marx’s Capital, thus providing pivotal philosophical concepts that would render it meaningful. In this sense, Marx was not a Marxist—a position he himself kept. The same could be applied to Jesus: Jesus could become Christian only retroactively. It always takes another figure to formalize a system of thought or belief by giving it a name (and, thus, meaning). In this regard, both Marx and Jesus Christ become Marxist and Christian, respectively, and only retroactively: from a name, they become a concept.