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Saint Paul: Friend of Derrida?
Robert S. Oventile
Pasadena City College
rsoventile@pasadena.edu
(c) 2005 Robert S. Oventile.
All rights reserved.
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Review of:
Jennings, Theodore W., Jr. Reading Derrida/Thinking Paul: On
Justice. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005.
1. Contemporary intellectuals interested in progressive and even
militantly leftist possibilities within religious thought have
turned increasingly to the letters of Saint Paul. Should one
concede Paul--himself a notable casualty of Empire--to the Right,
whether it take the form of theocratic boosters of a global /Pax
Americana/ or any other? Paul's letters have thus become a crucial
site for a political renegotiation of religion that has opened new
paths of inquiry for thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Alain
Badiou, and Slavoj Žižek. All three have engaged with Paul in
order to reformulate and to extend abiding political and
theoretical concerns. Agamben argues that Walter Benjamin's
allusions to Paul's letters signal a vital relation between
Benjamin's and Paul's respective understandings of messianic time:
a Benjaminian Paul becomes newly readable as addressing how one
lives life in the state of exception. For Badiou, Paul emerges as
"a poet-thinker of the event" (2). Paul's uncompromising fidelity
to the "Christ-event" and his articulation of the "discourse of
truth" that the event underwrites makes Paul the template "for a
new militant figure" (23, 6, 2). And, in league with Badiou, Žižek
finds in Paul "an engaged position of struggle, an uncanny
'interpellation' beyond ideological interpellation" that cuts
through liberal multiculturalism, pragmatic reformism, and desire
stalled in transgression to allow for a "community (or, rather,
/collective/) of believers" that is "held together not by a Master
Signifier, but by fidelity to a Cause" (112, 138, 130).
2. Equally important to this turn to religion is Jacques Derrida's
Specters of Marx, a text that worked to reassess Marx's judgment
of religious belief as ideology, and that has thus played an
important role in the "return" of some on the academic left to
religion. Indeed, over the last decade and a half, Derrida has
intensively queried religion and religious texts, arguing that any
renewed left project must come to terms with both the messianic
promise implicit in Marx and the autoimmune complications of the
messianic in the Judaic, Christian, and Islamic traditions. Yet,
unlike Agamben, Badiou, and Žižek, Derrida refrains from offering
either an explicit re-evaluation of Paul's letters or an
endorsement of a "left" Paul. On the contrary, Derrida directly
aligns Paul's discourse on veiling and unveiling with the history
of "truth as onto-logical revelation" that Derrida works to
transcend ("Silkworm" 83). Given Derrida's relative reserve on the
subject, is a rapprochement between Paul and Derrida conceivable?
Are there Pauline aspects to Derrida's texts and deconstructive
logistics available in Paul's letters? Should we add Derrida to
the growing list of thinkers for whom Paul is a political friend?
3. Theodore W. Jennings's Reading Derrida/Thinking Paul: On Justice
works to answer just such questions. Jennings wants to show how
Derrida's writings can illuminate Paul's Letter to the Romans and,
more specifically, the apostle's various claims about justice.
Jennings argues that Derrida and Paul resonate intriguingly with
one another because both share a passion for justice and for
thinking through the various /aporias/ that the pursuit of justice
entails. Jennings's chapters juxtapose Paul and Derrida on law,
violence, gift, faith, hospitality, and pardon in order to make
sense of that resonance.
4. Jennings convincingly elaborates a number of striking parallels
between Paul and Derrida. For instance, Jennings argues that
Derrida's claims in "The Force of Law" about the ways in which
justice necessarily exceeds law give us a new way to understand
Paul's distinction in Romans between law and justice. For Derrida,
justice exceeds law as law's condition of (im)possibility;
Jennings reads Paul as relating law to justice in a similar
manner. This reading brings Paul much closer to Derrida's focus on
justice as a crucially political question.
5. The English-language tradition of theological commentary on Romans
tends to understand Paul as concerned with a personal, moral
uprightness as opposed to politics as such. To loosen this
tradition's hold, Jennings argues that while the terms in Romans
that stem from the Greek root /dik/- (/dikaios/, /dikaiosune/,
/dikaioo/, /dikaioma/, /dikaiosis/, etc.) tend to appear in
English as words related to the idea "righteousness," these terms
are better translated as variations on the word "justice." Take
the following example from Romans: "Do not put your members at
sin's disposal as weapons of wickedness [/adikias/], but . . .
offer your members to God as weapons of uprightness
[/dikaiosunes/]" (Romans 6:13). The translation of /adikias/ as
"wickedness" and of /dikaiosunes/ as "uprightness" (or as
"righteousness" [NRSV]) obscures what Jennings identifies as
Paul's emphasis on an opposition between justice (/dikaiosunes/)
and injustice (/adikias/). Jennings thus retrieves Paul as a
specifically political thinker who, in writing on the relation
between justice and injustice, offers an account of political life
under empire.
6. This retrieval continues with Jennings's claim that in Romans Paul
addresses both Mosaic Law and Roman law as complexly related to
and yet finally distinct from the event of justice. The Paul
obsessed with beating down the Mosaic Law (Torah) might, in other
words, be a caricature bequeathed to us by such theologians as
Martin Luther, who depicts Paul as having "a contempt for the Law
of Moses" and as elaborating a violent theological devaluation of
the Law as starkly opposed to Christian grace (241). Luther's Paul
ominously declares, "the Law must be crucified," foreshadowing
Luther's Against the Jews and Their Lies, in which Luther
recommends that Christians burn synagogues and forbid rabbis,
"under threat of death," from teaching (245; qtd. in Hall 45).
/Contra/ Luther, Jennings finds a more subtle Paul who works
instead to define grace as the law's supplement: without grace,
law cannot realize justice. Like Derrida, Paul interrogates the
relation of justice to law in general, however much Paul's letters
focus on the commandments Moses brought down from Sinai. For Paul
as well as for Derrida, law executes justice. Justice only has a
chance if law exists (justice's occurrence depends on institutions
of law acting upon demands for justice); yet law inevitably falls
short of and even thwarts justice. On the one hand, law only
exists as law in reference to justice; on the other hand, law
becomes unjust when it is thought of as a closed system immune to
the demands of justice.
7. Jennings reads Jesus's crucifixion as an instance of the law
executing justice. Though both can legitimately claim to carry out
justice, Roman law and Mosaic Law each had a hand in the execution
of the one who for Paul embodied divine justice. Thus, neither
Mosaic Law nor Roman law can be a perfectly adequate vehicle for
divine justice. Law's death-dealing limits emerge from its very
effort to bring about the justice that law inevitably betrays in
practice. The hope for justice at once provokes law into action
and exposes law as unjust. Here Jennings shows another point at
which Paul and Derrida overlap. For Derrida, justice is the
undeconstructible source of the law's deconstruction, so that
"/Deconstruction is justice./ . . . Deconstruction takes place in
the interval that separates the undeconstructibility of justice
from the deconstructibility of law" ("Force" 243). In this
interval, Paul takes his seemingly ambivalent stance towards law.
The impression of ambivalence recedes when, thanks to Jennings, we
see that Paul, desiring justice, can neither simply embrace nor
simply reject the law.
8. Jennings argues in related terms that deconstruction neither
finishes law off nor brings forward a new law. Rather,
deconstruction returns one to the realization that no effort one
makes to pursue justice by acting on or reforming existing law can
result in a "good conscience." To rest easy in the assumption that
one has met one's responsibilities to justice defines "good
conscience." In the interval between deconstructible law and
undeconstructible justice, one undergoes the traumatic realization
that any simply lawful action one takes will fail to satisfy the
"demand for infinite justice" ("Force" 248). "Incalculable justice
/commands/ calculation," but any legal calculation one makes to
redress a transgression compromises justice (257). Given this
/aporia/, the assertion of a "good conscience" becomes the alibi
of those who collaborate in a violent erasure of the interval
between law and justice. Jennings links Derrida's rejection of
"good conscience" to Paul's impatience with "boasting": "Where,
then, is there room for boasting? It is ruled out! On what
principle? On the principle of deeds? No, but on the principle of
faith. For we maintain that a human being is justified by faith
apart from deeds prescribed by the law" (Romans 3.27). Paul
confronts antagonists who claim that their adherence to law proves
their justness. But for Paul, such a claim is "boasting," a
self-interested forgetting of the irreducibility of divine justice
to law. This forgetting leaves one open to accepting the violence
institutions call lawful.
9. Though the crucifixion exemplifies such lawful violence, any and
every law emerges as crucifixional insofar as it sacrifices
Pauline divine justice or Derridean infinite justice to the
preservation of existing institutions. No "deed" or "work" of law,
to use Paul's terms, can escape crucifixionality because any
"deed" or "work" only counts as such within existing legal
institutions and thus necessarily reinforces those same legal
institutions. The same will be true for any reformed institution
of law. Paul insists that the only hope for untangling oneself
from the crucifixional aspect of law is God's free gift of grace.
All "those who receive the abundance of God's grace and his gift
of justice" become just; they are "justified freely by his grace"
(Romans 5:17, translation modified; Romans 3:24). For Paul, one
becomes just not by one's deeds but by the gift of grace, a gift
one receives irrespective of any work of law one either does or
does not perform. Grace alone allows one to fulfill the law and to
achieve justice. The event of grace as gift both exceeds the
economics of works and allows a work of law to arrive at justice.
Since a demand for infinite justice motivates law, no work is
sufficient to clear one's debt to the law. Only in grace is one
justified, so justice too is God's gift. No action can pay for
grace; one can only have faith that grace and thus justice will come.
10. Paul's notion of grace both foreshadows and finds clarification in
Derrida's writings about the gift. And, as Jennings points out,
gift and justice are for Derrida intimately related concepts.
Jennings cites Derrida's statement that his analyses of "the gift
beyond exchange and distribution . . . are also, through and
through, at least oblique discourses on justice" ("Force" 235).
Derrida's writings on the gift allow one better to understand the
paradoxical interaction in Romans between the aneconomic gift of
grace/justice and the law, which is inseparable from the economics
of works. Referring to Derrida's work on the gift, Jennings argues
that far from making justice superfluous, the Pauline gift of
grace is that which allows justice to happen.
11. Jennings thus helps us to understand that, for Paul and for
Derrida, one cannot simply make justice happen. On the one hand,
justice demands that one work to prepare the best terms for its
arrival, but, on the other, when and if justice arrives, it
arrives as a necessarily unprogrammable event. Jennings's emphasis
on justice as gift finds confirmation in one of Derrida's last
essays, "'Justices,'" in which Derrida writes that, to be among
the just is a "gift that one cannot acquire": "The just one has a
gift" (691). Preliminary to the arrival of the gift of justice is
forgiveness. In Romans, the just have been forgiven, even for
their participation in the crucifixional dynamic of the law. The
gift of grace and thus justice arrive precisely in the forgiving
of the unforgivable; again, Jennings's point is that, like grace,
forgiveness allows justice to happen. Derrida leads the way to
this understanding of forgiveness or pardon in Paul when he argues
that one can only meaningfully forgive the unforgivable. Any
transgression or fault that could simply be redressed by paying a
fine or undergoing a penalty does not require or solicit what
Derrida calls "pure" or "unconditional" forgiveness. Only the
utterly and frighteningly unforgivable can be forgiven.
12. A book-length study of Derrida in relation to Paul is overdue, and
Reading Derrida/Thinking Paul: On Justice offers readers of
Derrida many new insights. Even so, Jennings leaves aside a number
of difficult questions as to how and why Paul and Derrida might
diverge in their thinking. At several points in Reading
Derrida/Thinking Paul: On Justice, Jennings acknowledges that Paul
and especially some of Paul's theological exegetes (Luther, for
example) bear responsibility for the grievous history of
anti-Semitism, religiously excused colonial violence, sexism, and
homophobia. Why does one not find an extensive chapter in Reading
Derrida/Thinking Paul that grapples with this responsibility?
Although Jennings indicates in his conclusion that he is preparing
just such work, the avoidance of the question of Paul's
responsibility for injustice may find an explanation in the
Derrida Jennings brings to Paul. Jennings emphasizes the Derrida
of such texts as "The Force of Law: The 'Mystical Foundation of
Authority'," Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, Of Hospitality, and
On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, rather than the Derrida of
such texts as Speech and Phenomena and Of Grammatology. That is,
Reading Derrida/Thinking Paul tends to avoid the Derrida whose
deconstruction of the opposition between letter and spirit stems
from his passion for justice. Rather than a solution or answer to
justice's /aporias/, this Derrida would arguably find urgently
problematic Paul's statement in Romans that "one is not a Jew
outwardly only; nor is real circumcision external, in the flesh.
Rather, one is a Jew in secret, and real circumcision is of the
heart, a thing of the spirit, not of the letter" (2:28-29).
Outside versus inside, tangible flesh versus intangible heart,
letter versus spirit: such oppositions are at work when Paul
claims that the believer, as "a letter of Christ," is "written not
with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of
stone but on tablets of human hearts" (2 Corinthians 3.3). And
these oppositions are crucial to Paul's effort to distinguish the
"new covenant" in Christ from the "ministry of death, chiseled in
letters on stone tablets" (2 Corinthians 3.6, 3.7). The new
covenant is "not of letter but of spirit; for the letter kills,
but the Spirit gives life" (2 Corinthians 3.6). The Paul who
allegorizes the Mosaic Law as a "ministry of death" is the Paul of
whom Derrida can write that he is "this very mild, this terrible
Paul [,] . . . whose monstrous progeny are our history and
culture" ("Silkworm" 76).
English Division
Pasadena City College
rsoventile@pasadena.edu
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Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the
Letter to the Romans. Trans. Patricia Dailey. Stanford: Stanford
UP, 2005.
Badiou, Alain. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Trans.
Ray Brassier. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003.
Derrida, Jacques. "Force of Law: The 'Mystical Foundation of
Authority.'" Trans. Mary Quaintance. Acts of Religion. Ed. Gil
Anidjar. New York: Routledge, 2002. 230-98.
---. "'Justices.'" Critical Inquiry 31.3 (2005): 689-721.
---. "A Silkworm of One's Own." Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Veils.
Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001.
17-108.
Hall, Sidney G., III. Christian Anti-Semitism and Paul's Theology.
Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993.
Luther, Martin. "Death to the Law." Trans. Jaroslav Pelikan. The
Writings of St. Paul. Ed. Wayne A. Meeks. New York: Norton, 1972.
236-50.
The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version. Ed.
Bruce M. Metzger and Ronald E. Murphy. New York: Oxford UP, 1994.
Romans. Trans. Joseph A. Fitzmyer. New York: Doubleday, 1993.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of
Christianity. Cambridge: MIT P, 2003.