Abstract
What does it mean to be alive in the twenty-first century? Žižek, as quoted in the previous chapter, offers up some suggestions: the suicide bomber at the moment before detonation, the soldier turned computer-programmer who never has to face real hand-to-hand combat, and the affluent Westerner whose paranoid fear over death and aging is managed through suffocating fitness and dietary regimes. To these we might add the inmates of Guantanamo, the ones “the bombs missed”; the college students pumped full of Prozac and lithium because the pressure of grades, tuition fees, and social acceptance prove too much to actually “live” through; and the migrant workers forced to live in underpasses and garbage disposal units having left their homes, families, and communities in search of a “better” life.
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Notes
Dunn points out how there are only 16 references to the name Jesus (alone) in the entire Pauline corpus (Rom 3:26, 8:11; 1 Cor 12:3; 2 Cor 4:5b, 10 (twice), 11 (twice), 14, 11:4; Gal 6:17; Phil 2:10; 1 Thess 1:10, 4:14 (twice); also Eph 4:21) in James D. G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (London: T&T Clark, 2003), 196. As Agamben reminds us, Christos in Paul’s letters should always be translated as “Messiah” and it is only the result of “a millenary tradition that left the word christos untranslated” that the term Messiah is rendered absent in Paul’s texts and Christ read as a proper name. See Agamben, Time that Remains, 15–16.
Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, translated by Leslie Ann Boldt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 7.
Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 539. As a result of this text based on lectures given at l’École des Hautes Études between 1933 and 1939, Alexandre Kojève came to be widely regarded as the ambassador for Hegel in France.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel’s Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by Yirmiyahu Yovel (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005), 128.
Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, translated by Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 209.
Georges Bataille, “Letter to X, Lecturer on Hegel” in The Bataille Reader, edited by Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 296–300; 296.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, translated by Iain Hamilton Grant (London: Sage Publications, 1993), 158.
See also Georges Bataille, “Hegel, Death and Sacrifice” in Yale French Studies, 78 (1990), 9–28.
James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (London: Flamingo, 1994), 5.
Hervé Guibert, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (London: Quartet Books, 1995).
David Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1995), 163.
Patrick ffrench, “Michel Foucault: Life as a Work of Art” in The Art of the Project: Projects and Experiments in Modern French Culture, edited by Johnnie Gratton and Michael Sheringham (New York, NY, and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005), 213.
The fundamental difference between the eternal life rendered possible by the Christ-event and a biopolitical conception that remains restricted to physical, worldly existence is emphasized by John Milbank in his essay “Paul Against Biopolitics.” Our claim here is not contra Milbank that Paul is biopolitical but, rather, that the structure of Paul and Foucault’s articulation of the relationship between life and death bears important similarities. See John Milbank, “Paul Against Biopolitics,” Theory, Culture & Society, 25.7–8 (2008), 125–72.
Jeffrey Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and its Intensifications since 1984 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008).
Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 13.
John Ziesler, Paul’s Letter to the Romans (London and Philadelphia, PA: SCM Press, 1989), 75.
Mika Ojakangas, “Impossible Dialogue on Bio-Power: Agamben and Foucault,” Foucault Studies, 2 (November 2005), 23.
Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, translated by Lydia G. Cochrane (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 125–6.
Mika Ojakangas, “On the Pauline Roots of Biopolitics: Apostle Paul in Company with Foucault and Agamben,” Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory 11.1 (Winter 2010), 92–110.
Ernst Käsemann, Commentary on Romans, translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley (London: SCM Press, 1980), 158.
Martinus C. de Boer, The Defeat of Death: Apocalyptic Eschatology in 1 Corinthians 15 & Romans 5 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1988), 176.
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 83.
For discussion on survival, see Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture, 15.1 (2003) and Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York, NY: Zone Books, 1999).
See in particular Gerhard Kittel (ed.), Theological Dictionary of the New Testament Vol. 4, translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), 194–214.
James D. G. Dunn, Romans9–16 (Dallas, TX: Word, 1988), 576.
In light of Israel’s land reclamation policies that have displaced large swathes of the Palestinian population, there is an uncomfortable irony at work here that merits further examination elsewhere. See, for example, Eyal Weizman’s Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London and New York, NY: Verso, 2007).
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© 2013 Sophie Fuggle
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Fuggle, S. (2013). Between Life and Death. In: Foucault/Paul. Radical Theologies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137323408_3
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