By now we are probably all at least nominally familiar with the renaissance that Paul and his thought have seen in certain academic quarters. Numerous philosophers (some religious, some not), critical theorists (again, some religious, some not), and theologians (some radical, some orthodox, and some in between) have (re)turned to the Pauline corpus, seeking within it resources for thought and practice that would allow us to disrupt and reconfigure the present.

The attention recently given to the apostle may come across as odd, even misguided, to some, especially to those who associate Paul with authority and stasis, with the maintenance of a broadly construed theological and ecclesiastical conservatism. In this sense, it is perhaps even a more suspicious undertaking when thinkers who are on the whole not theologically inclined, at least in the traditional sense, get involved in Paul’s revival. Have they not understood what Nietzsche said, that Paulinism is little more than a “Platonism for the masses” and, hence, a slave morality shot through with ressentiment? Yet, if Paul has often been associated with the status quo, he has also been a source of critical insight and praxis and, at times, revolution—for believers, nonbelievers, and the indifferent alike.1 It is this other Paul, for instance, that is behind Alain Badiou’s claim that Paul is for us a “new militant figure” because of the way he thinks the relationship between truth and the subject and Giorgio Agamben’s claim that Paul’s letters constitute “the fundamental messianic text of the Western tradition.”2

Blanton’s own reading of Paul in A Materialism for the Masses3 clearly has more in common with the latter, more subversive reading of Paul. Yet he is also critical of recent philosophical appropriations of Paul, because they tend to unwittingly repeat elements that make up the theological-political myth undergirding Christendom and, more generally, the idea of the West. That myth retroactively establishes Paul as the founder of a new religion called “Christianity,” a religion that constitutes itself in opposition to “Judaism” while simultaneously aligning itself with the intellectual, cultural, and political machinery of empire.

Blanton notes that this myth begins to develop early on; we see its nascent form in Acts, for example, and it is well established by the time of Eusebius’s Platonizing history of Christian origins. But its structuring element, the equation of Paul with the institution of a religious break in history, abides, and even so among critics of that myth and those who would repurpose the apostle for more radical ends. When Nietzsche criticizes Paulinism as a “Platonism for the masses,” he does so on the assumption that the name “Paul” is synonymous with the opening of an entirely new and exclusive trajectory. Likewise, although the current (re)turn to Paul has sought to evaluate the apostle’s thought otherwise—though in light of—Nietzsche’s critique, much of the literature related to Paul’s resurgence continues to assume the anachronistic distinction between “Christianity” and “Judaism,” formally and often in content.4

Blanton wants to unearth or “resurrect” another Paul, a Paul that the theological tradition and, to some extent, Paul’s contemporary apostles have repressed. Blanton’s Paul is not at the origin of anything, certainly not a new “religion” called “Christianity.”5 Blanton’s Paul is rather one source among many, in his own context and ours, that allows us to think a “materialism for the masses.” Paul certainly remains exemplary for Blanton, but his significance lies not in the authority of a theological-political foundation but in the contingent and differential interplay between Paul’s texts and our context, mediated through a philosophical archive that includes, among others, Althusser, Breton, Foucault, Delueze, Baudrillard, and Lacan. Blanton flattens the relationship between Paul, Paul’s interlocutors, and our context,6 which allows him to find in Paul a surplus of life, an excess of life subtracted from its biopolitical capture in the disciplinary mechanisms that allow late capitalism to function.

It is difficult to do justice to Blanton’s argument in this context. Blanton’s book is important as an intervention into Paul’s current resurgence and reception and, indeed, it is one of the more sophisticated and creative appropriations of the apostle out there, which is no doubt partly the result of his skill at seamlessly pairing philosophical acumen with critical historical scholarship. Blanton’s use of Paul also has broader implications, in that Blanton’s criticism of the common reception and interpretation of Paul simultaneously functions as a postsecular critique of the modern constructions of “religion” and the “secular.” In short, there is much that I agree with and find useful in this book, and I hope that it gets the broad reading that it deserves.

That said, just as Blanton wants to think with Paul along the lines mentioned above, in what follows I want to think with Blanton along two interrelated trajectories. To begin with, Blanton’s use of Paul as an exemplary source for thinking an excess of life takes place within a more general shift in how power functions. This is the shift that Foucault spent much of his energy documenting and theorizing, from power as fundamentally repressive to power as fundamentally constructive and creative, from power as a concentrated, sovereign force that coerces bodies to power as a productive, biopolitical force that traverses and constitutes bodies. Foucault’s genealogical investigations into this shift are, of course, not only descriptive but constructive as well: the goal is to harness the constitutive force of power for liberative ends through the development of technologies of the self.

As Blanton discusses, in the conclusion to the third volume of A History of Sexuality, Paul surfaces as an instrumental thinker of this shift, but Foucault’s evaluation is largely negative. Blanton notes that Foucault consigns Paul to “the founder of a form of Christian moral system whose inventive machinations will engender a ‘self’ constituted by its being turned against itself, at once constitutively guilty, fallen, and also profoundly normalized by the universalization of its underlying metaphysical narrative.”7 In understanding Paul in these terms, however, Foucault uncritically repeats the theological-political myth mentioned above. If Foucault had not couched his understanding of Paul within the terms of this traditional narrative, he would, perhaps, have seen Paul in a more subversive light, as an archive for a material politics of the self that resists biopolitical normalization.

I find Blanton’s criticism of Foucault convincing, here, but I bring it up primarily to focus on the understanding of power involved and how it shapes Blanton’s reading of Paul and his sense of Paul’s importance. Although numerous influences and factors shape Blanton’s understanding and use of Paul, the shift to a biopolitical understanding of power is a crucial element. Blanton, for instance, writes that today “Paul returns as a peculiarly forceful touchstone within an economy whereby we are all subjects of, and subject to, the capacity to seize on a chance opportunity in order to destabilize the very force of normativity.”8 The emphasis on biopower as the political condition for understanding Paul and his importance for us, in this sense, determines the form of Blanton’s reading of Paul.

I think it is safe to say that the traditional reading of Paul that Blanton criticizes is a reading that assumes sovereignty as its horizon: Paul is correlated with a foundational exception that is at the origin of relatively stable, unified trajectory, a trajectory whose terms clearly delineate what and who is in and what and who is out.9 Such an understanding of Paul, in turn, lends itself to a more systematic reading, in which Paul’s thought is considered a consistent and clearly defined corpus that can be reiterated as a theology or a philosophy.

Contrary to this more systematic approach—which, we should add, is favored by many of Paul’s current advocates—Blanton’s approach takes place in a field of immanence and is more piecemeal, and this is consistent with the shift from sovereignty to biopower.10 Paul, for Blanton, provides a lexicon of overdetermined tropes that can be used ad hoc to intervene in and consequently disrupt equally overdetermined biopolitical networks. Otherwise put, Paul is not an authority for Blanton but an exemplary thinker of excess, which also means that Paul does not bequeath us a theological or philosophical doctrine but instead incites us to experimentation. This is why, simultaneously channeling Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Deleuze, Blanton insists that we “do not yet know . . . what a Paulinist can do.”11

Blanton’s approach to Paul, in this sense, is significant and compelling, and it opens up Paul’s texts to uses that have for numerous reasons been repressed, if not simply ignored, by a theological and ecclesiastical tradition that values stasis and continuity. Blanton’s reading of Paul, in other words, makes Paul available for uses that are indifferent to the usual demarcations that would sanitize the apostle and his thought, demarcations between, for example, “religion” and the “secular,” “spiritual” and “material.”

As much as I appreciate Blanton’s approach and what it enables us to do, I do wonder if it does not move too quickly in certain respects. Specifically, although I think a reading of Paul that correlates with the biopolitical dispersion of power is necessary, it seems that Blanton elides or, at the very least, downplays the various ways that power also continues to operate through sovereign, juridical means.12 Blanton does at times rely on conceptual schemes and language that would seem to lend itself to a reading of power that takes it as a repressive force set over against the subject, as is the case in his discussion of death as subtraction.13 But what is left unclear is the relationship between these forms of power and what role a more classical understanding of power-as-sovereignty might play in the deployment of the Pauline corpus.

It is in relation to this point that I still find formal aspects of the theological-political myth of Paul that Blanton criticizes useful, precisely because of the “sovereign” evental disjunction that it allows us to think. To be clear, in making this claim I am primarily making a claim about the form of the myth rather than its content. To the extent that the content of the “Christian origins” story provides theological justification for Christian anti-Semitism, colonialism, and imperialism—both past and present—then Blanton is certainly right that it must be criticized and dismissed.

Nevertheless, I think it is theoretically and practically possible to separate the form of the myth from its content. One could object, of course, that form is irrevocably linked to content, and in this sense, it remains unclear to me whether Blanton’s criticism is ultimately directed toward the content of the myth, its form, or both. I think that for Blanton it is both, but I also think that it is possible to avoid what might be taken as the necessary entanglement of a specific content (in this case, the content of the theological-political myth) and form so long as the contingency of its narrative trajectory is taken into account, both theoretically and practically. Indeed, it is exactly the lack of awareness of its own contingency that is one of the main problems with the traditional “Christian origins” story.

I would suggest that, ironically, Badiou’s reading of Paul in Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism accounts for that contingency. I say that this is ironic because among current philosophical readings of Paul, Badiou’s is often considered one of the worst offenders when it comes to recapitulating the theological-political myth of Paul.14 A cursory reading of Badiou’s “reactivation” of Paul would seem to confirm this. On Badiou’s account, Paul’s militant fidelity to the resurrection-event is of the order of the absolutely new, taking the form of a “Christian” break with “Judaism.”15

When read in light of Badiou’s philosophy as a whole, however, I would suggest that Badiou’s reading of Paul is far more complicated. I cannot here go into the detail necessary to make this claim fully, but it hinges on the retroactive recognition of the evental break. For Badiou, there is always a lag between an event and its recognition as event, meaning that what we recognize as an historical rupture is, in a way, always a retroactive construction that is subtracted from its situation. This is why Badiou claims in Being and Event that the form of fidelity to an event is the future anterior: the truth of an event will have been presented.16 What this implies is that the activity of a subject in relation to an event is always in excess of the subject him-, her-, or itself, but this excess is only legible retroactively, behind the back of the subject, so to speak. In the case of Paul, Paul can, along with Blanton, thus function simultaneously as a Jewish partisan with no designs for establishing “Christianity” as a novel trajectory over against “Judaism” and as the architect of that evental trajectory, even if the latter role may remain consciously unknown to Paul himself. The differences between these two views of Paul cannot, on this view, be reduced to a matter of interpretation: both “Pauls” are in Paul himself, circulating in the irreducible excess of his thought and practice.

Badiou’s Saint Paul, I would suggest, is an exhibition of such retroactive construction, (Badiou calls it a “reactivation”), an exhibition that is to some extent aware that it is a construction. In raising the possibility of reading Badiou’s Saint Paul in this way, I am not suggesting that we choose one Paul over the other but acknowledge and deploy both critically and constructively: Blanton’s diffuse, biopolitical Paul and Badiou’s more straightforward, evental Paul. Despite Blanton’s correct observation that the latter often tends toward simplification, thinking in, through, and ultimately against the operations of sovereign power sometimes requires that move; as Badiou says elsewhere, “Sometimes we must know how to simplify the world.”17 What differentiates this articulation of an evental Paul from its more conservative theological counterparts is, however, the awareness of its own contingency, which leaves its narrative trajectory open to reconfiguration and interruption from its others, in both the past, present and future. Both Pauls then, and the encounter between them, may generate a thinking that can simultaneously address biopower and juridical sovereignty. Indeed, the terms of such an encounter, I would suggest, are already present in Blanton’s own use of Paul, as in, for instance, his discussion of death as transformative subtraction, which resonates to some extent with Badiou’s own theory of the event.18

I also think, however, that this emphasis on Paul needs to be diversified, which is the second trajectory that I want to explore briefly by way of conclusion. Blanton, I have discussed, wants to unearth a Paul that has been repressed by the theological-political myth of “Christian origins.” By unearthing an other Paul, Blanton hopes to dislodge Paul from the site of Christianity’s origins, which also has the effect of making that site itself diffuse, scattered among multiple overlapping sites. Yet, like the theological-political myth that he calls into question, Blanton’s focus is still on Paul. Paul is certainly read otherwise, but it is still Paul that Blanton—and, it seems, everyone else—is reading.

On the one hand, it may come across as a little unfair to criticize Blanton on this point, since the book does not pretend to be about anything other than Paul and Paul’s legacies. But on the other hand, if the goal to scatter the site of Christianity’s origin for radical political ends, then at some point we must actually scatter those origins by doing the same operation on other “founders” of Christianity, to the extent that we can.

And here, I want to make a plea for Jesus, though let me be clear: my plea is not for (re)turning to the divine Jesus of the theological tradition or for some sort of pious discipleship. Rather, what I am interested in—and what I think is vital if we are to (re)think “Christian” sources beyond received categories for more radical ends—is to read Jesus as presented in the gospels in similar fashion to the way that Blanton and others have read Paul. Call it, to borrow from Badiou, a “reactivation” of Jesus.

Indeed, as Blanton’s Paul is the repressed content of the Paul of “Christian origins,” I would say that Jesus, especially his thought and life, is the repressed content of both and, indeed, the theological and ecclesiastical tradition itself.19 Important here, for instance, are Paul’s emphasis on identification with the crucified and Blanton’s own use of this trope to think “undying life” as an “undoing of the power of power.”20 This biopolitical emphasis on death—Jesus’s actual death and Paul’s/our identification with it—is, in many ways, quite traditional, in that it repeats the theological tradition’s emphasis on that death’s salvific character. Ironically, even if read otherwise, what an emphasis on crucifixion conceals or represses is life, the material life of Jesus: in similar fashion to the theological-political myth of the Pauline origin, crucifixion condenses Jesus’ life and its complexity into a single event. Thus in Paul we hear nothing about what Jesus said and did and in Blanton Paul sometimes seem to slide into the place of Jesus.21 Complicating the Christian story of origins and disrupting the theological, ecclesiastical, and political traditions and institutions that derive from it also involves, I would suggest, unearthing Jesus’ repressed life as well. If read in similar fashion to the way in which Paul has lately been read, I would suggest that that life, what Jesus said and did, provides just as many resources for blurring our categories and thinking (bio)politically, resources that are, perhaps, even more radical than what Paul offers us.

Why are there celebratory banquets for the undead rather than nothing? (65)

I was interested in what Ward Blanton had to say about life. This is, as the title promises, A Materialism for the Masses that is also about Saint Paul and the Philosophy of Undying Life. It was this life, and its undying, that I was most after.

In his preface, Blanton seductively illuminates facets of this (Pauline) materialism that eternally returns, without dying. Blanton is interested, he tells us, not in how this materialism will offer salvation but rather how it might be an “emancipation of the ephemeral,” an undying life that is not captured by the mechanics of metaphysics. This “world without end, this eternal life” that we struggle now to invent seems to be constructed primarily by “calling on old archival allies to weave together promising collectivities” (xv). There is also some suggestion that these collectivities are part of this “religion of the future” that he also briefly evokes, one that will “be keyed to difference, ecological interrelations, and the emancipation of new kinds of worldliness” (xiv).

There is much I like about all of this. I, too, want the ephemeral to be emancipated. It sounds like such a good idea, whatever it might mean. I, too, want to learn to do this most difficult of all things: to be worldly in the affirmative sense, to learn finally to love this difficult world. I, too, want to be able to confess my dependence on these old archival allies as I seek to imagine these new conditions for living. But all of this is not, ultimately, what the rest of Blanton’s book is about. All of this is, it seems, what Blanton hopes and waits for. This book is a project for the meantime—it is a project to “emancipate Paul” from “a few of the metaphysical and sacrificially controlling apparatuses constitutive of western governance” (xvii). This emancipation, perhaps, is to be understood as a kind of building block in the more eventual emancipations.

Ultimately this also means, I think, that the nature and shape of this undying life to which Blanton’s title refers gets a bit lost. There are a few reasons that, I surmise, this happens. One is simply the nature of the project. Blanton’s Albert Schweitzeresque radical historicization of the Paul of the philosophers is a complex undertaking. It takes us on many winding paths, into many live conversations, and hands us many axes to grind. It is rich, and thick, and dense. I hope I will be forgiven for side-stepping much of that as I give in to my own myopia and continue to think about these little flickers and glimmers that Blanton hands us, of undying life. But the other reason, it seem to me, that the undying that his title refers to is a bit obscured is partly due to the fact that—as I see it—undying is a bit overshadowed by the undead.

To be sure the suggestion that we might find, in Paul, an undying life that eternally returns without end is also just one of Blanton’s rhetorical devices for bringing Paul into more intimate proximity with the Nietzchean eternal return (and all the disciples of immanence it has since generated). For Paul is not, as Blanton argues in his most determined gripe against Nietzsche, a pop Platonist who freezes us into the icy cold hypostasized regions of the dreary metaphysical afterlife. It is from Nietzsche above all, perhaps, that Blanton wants to emancipate Paul. And so to suggest that Paul presents us with an undying life is clearly not a gesture disconnected from this particular emancipation that Blanton is attempting to perform.

It does seem to me, however, that in the end I am left with a feeling that the undead Paul—as one of the undead messiahs—has become more salient than the undying life that Blanton suggests will be revealed. This is not to say that I think Blanton fails to address this undying life. Indeed, particularly toward the end of the book, it seems to blend and fuse with his discussion of chance and become something like the “attentiveness to this open space of transformation” that Blanton argues the Pauline “drama of divinity” confronts us with (175). This undying life seems to become a kind of kairological surplus, a manner of reconceiving power that Blanton ultimately finds in Paul. It hovers, elusively, over the closure of the book. But perhaps it seems to me, ultimately, that the ephemerality of this undying life and its processual quality is never quite emancipated.

What Blanton seeks to emancipate is Paul—and what ultimately seems emancipated here, then, is a figure. The contingency of Paul, himself, is revealed. And Paul begins to walk among the “old archival allies” again, in a new way. Paul—always an undead messiah—is even more freshly undead. I want to spend a moment thinking about what this means.

Blanton asks us, playfully, why there are “celebratory banquets for the undead rather than nothing” (65). When he speaks of the undead, I hear him evoking those figures who may have—before the critique of ontotheology—understood themselves as building their immortality into our books (or, at the very least, in the word). This book, in its own way, is a kind of celebratory banquet for the undead, evoking these figures not in the immortality they might have hoped for but into a less settling undeadness. And, I think, although this question evokes a philosophical concern (aping the old concern over why there is something, rather than nothing), it is in the particular sort of banquet that Blanton hosts here that this project reveals itself as a philosophical or theoretical project with what seem like ultimately theological stakes. For, it seems to me, that the celebratory banquet for the undead person, or the undead philosopher, is never quite the same thing as the celebratory banquet for the undead messiah.

Among these ancestors who present themselves to us, as archival allies, the messiah is something other than the philosopher. Whoever they are—these friends and rivals who are enshrined in the undeadness of text—they are lively, they live through us in some manner, they fail to go away. But the particular way in which messiahs live on in us is unique. The affective stakes seem distinct. The messiahs—no matter how undead they are—make different (more extreme) claims over our bodies and our loyalties. Our dependence on them, their dependence on us, has higher stakes. I have suggested that this banquet that we host, when we want to commune with them, has stakes that appear almost more theological in part because it seems to me that our mode of relating to them seizes us more completely—heart, soul, might. Their undeadness makes more totalizing demands.

Beyond that, it also seems to me that the undeadness of these messiahs like Paul, the undeadness of the philosophers with whom (and for whom) we host banquets, is not necessarily an undeadness generated by the kairos of what Blanton is calling undying life. If undying life is about open spaces of transformation, or chance encounters, or modes of reconceiving power, those figures who we hold to be undead seem to remain in their undeadness through another sort of process or exercise.

What ultimately makes a messiah like Paul so undead seems less about chance, and contingency, and more about the way that we focus on them, iconize them, devote ourselves to them with discipline, commit ourselves to them. What makes them undead, then, is deliberation and fidelity. They are undead not because life itself is undying and the world is without end—because there are, ultimately, so many human bodies who are not hanging their hats in the halls of undeadness. Instead, it seems to me, they become undead (and remain undead) because of their own refusals to be dispersed by chance, and because of our fervent commitment to prevent their dissolutions under the pressures of contingency.

Perhaps I am here revealing the extent to which I have read undeadness as a kind of cognate for immortality. I don’t wish to suggest that they are, in fact, the same thing. But it may be the case that I do see undeadness and immortality resonating with more affinity than Blanton does. Perhaps undeadness is less hypostasized than immortality, but there is still something stiff and immobile—almost like a corpse, something like a zombie—that the term undeadness evokes. I don’t, necessarily, see undeadness as a wholesale rejection of the dynamics of classical metaphysics. It seems to me there is more continuity there. Nor, I suppose, do I see this as a terrible, horrible, problem. I should add that the notion of undying, too, seems to pull us back toward realms that are eternal in their basic nature. At the very least, it keeps us in their shadows. And, I suppose, this is why we are attracted to them. What interests me about undying life (more than the undead) has little to do with which is more metaphysical than the other. I think it has more to do with the zombie masks of the undead. I am more interested in—allured by—the spark, the liveliness, the churning quality of an undying life than I am in the stiffness and coldness of an undead figure.

But these are simply questions being funneled through my own myopias. Just a few notes, perhaps, to file away for the religion of the future.

I am grateful to Ward Blanton for this energetic, challenging and suggestive work from which I have learned much. With these few remarks I hope to express my appreciation for what the author has undertaken in A Materialism for the Masses—Saint Paul and the Philosophy of Undying Life, and to test my understanding of the gist of its argument.

The argument builds upon and reflects key features of his previous book Displacing Christian Origins (University of Chicago Press, 2007). In that work, Blanton had suggested that whatever else they may be, accounts of Christian origins are always also performances of cultural power which negotiate contemporary philosophical matters and construe disciplinary terrain precisely by way of their representations. Representations of the origin of Christianity are effectively placeholders for our competing stakes in—and attitudes towards—the cultural and institutional politics of our own moment. In analysing a number of such performances from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Blanton pressed for the dissolution of the mutually entangling logic of “religious” and “secular” takes on the matter of biblical studies. His aim there was finally to contend for the status of the study of religion as critical thinkingby attaining to a “purely immanent, secularizing—or this-worlding—critique” of the field and its objects of study beyond the “ephemeral banality” of the constructed contrast between “religion” and “secularity” (p. 170 of that volume). The ambition, in short, was to attain to a properly critical practice of biblical studies whose naturalism was not contrastive but simply absolute.

In this new book, Blanton focusses in upon the figure of Paul and the nature of Paulinism. He asks whether we can encounter Paul afresh and do so outwith the controlling frameworks of the predominant cultural memory of the West. These frameworks, he argues, deliver Paul to us as either the sublime originator of an exceptional and super-cessionist Christianity (theology), or the purveyor of a pernicious “Platonism for the masses,” as Nietzsche famously styled it (philosophy). Is there another Paul with another teaching that can be excavated from beneath these cultural edifices? Blanton’s answer is yes. And he pursues the trail of a Paul ungoverned and ungovernable by the “controlling apparatuses constitutive of Western governance,” a prophet of “materialist spirituality” (xvii), a hopeful insurgent for the concrete possibilities for freedom, engagement and solidarity even in our bio-political era, and a “site” upon which to turn analyses of the power dynamics that constitute contemporary social life. Discerning and displaying this other Paul is the central labour of the book as a whole.

Blanton’s is a work of critical theory and his choice of interlocutors reflects this. Much conceptual aid and provocation is drawn from the thought of Deleuze, Lacan, Agamben and Zižek in particular. The argument advances by way of critical readings of the fate of Paul at the hands of other leading theorists of earlier generations. Blanton argues that in a series of missed opportunities Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida and others ultimately failed to trace the true “signature of Paul” in their various engagements with his figure and teaching. These readings admitted all-too uncritically the “retrospective” co-option of Paul by the architects of Christian collaboration with Greco-Roman culture and political power, a project Blanton detects already in the narrative strategy of Acts. The picture is one in which the figure of Paul is made to be the “first Christian . . . for very questionable ends” and winds up a sacred corpse safely buried away “in the “foundations” of an emerging church” (37). This “bad Paul” is thus an epiphenomenon of particular ancient economies of human desire and power; he is an iconic cog in the gears of a an enduring cultural politics whose true form escaped detection by even the great genealogists, who on this score often read “like the most traditional church theologian” (41). Blanton himself looks to prosecute a more thoroughgoing genealogy that espies and penetrates beneath these machinations, in order to discern clearly the features of the suppressed Paul long in our cultural memory, a Paul we were meant to forget.

Blanton’s method for securing this hyper-critical insight is to experiment with reading Paul as a figure in the “underground stream” of materialist thinking that runs through the history of western thought. The epicurean concept of the clinamen and its contemporary theoretical exploitation proves decisive. The notion is drawn from Lucretius” de rerum natura where it names the inexplicable deviation—the “swerve’—of moving atoms which produce the collisions which lie at the root of all physical movement. Two features of the clinamen are of supreme relevance for its theoretical exploitation here. The first is its a-causal nature: just as the atomic “swerve” is spontaneous, without cause, so too Blanton suggests we can understand the Pauline “calling” at the root of Paulinism as something singular, entirely uncalled for, excessive, emerging as it were “out of nothing.” A theologically inclined reader might imagine that in this epicurean idea Blanton has alighted upon is a philosophical category well-suited to articulate important features of the logic of divine grace. Such a judgment would be premature, however, in view of the second feature of the clinamen, namely its utterly material immanence. For the mysterious and unpredictable deviation at the root of all things—the source of dynamism, of movement, particularity and thus also joy—is itself a material and immanent cause. It is not a transcendent Unmoved Mover, but rather the random twitching of the smallest and most elemental features of our constitutive materiality, which provides the arch-metaphor for the inexplicable source of human singularity, psychic events, transgressive agency and so also of freedom. It is the force of this idea to encourage, nay demand, that a contemporary materialist account of religion—including Paul’s religion—proceed “without rehearsing the same fantasies about that entity which religion itself (sometimes at least) peddles” (49–50). With this category and its ramifications, it appears that a materialist metaphysics can provide at once the realist ontological basis for a fully immanent, naturalised explanation of such human phenomena, as well as funding the most fruitful theoretical tropes with which we can and ought to understand ourselves on this score. In a rather elegant passage, Blanton summarises the claim:

Internal to immanent, causal realities from which we will not be saved by another world or outside agency, there is nevertheless a chance, the very chance of thought itself, which is indicative of a minor freedom, a minimal swerve, a line around which we might spin ourselves in a metanoia that will itself feed back into the otherwise ironclad ground from which it emerged. (61)

In a world without old-fashion transcendence, idealistic fairy tales of heroic salvation ab extra have only ideological and certainly not emancipatory power. But, as this passage suggests, there is a new-fashioned kind of transcendence afoot in the world, a materially produced force fully immanent within the midst of earthly life that represents “subjective openness within material causality as such” (68) and which gives rise to the only possibilities we have for resisting our fate.

Blanton advocates for a reading of Paul as an event of this kind of material spirituality, and the better part of the volume trials ways of conceiving and giving voice to just how this is so. In this he takes singular inspiration from Stanislas Breton’s writings on the apostle. Breton’s thinking draws contemporary theory and materialist metaphysics into an encounter with “the apocalyptic and mystical world of Paulinist insurgency” (70–71). Paul and Althusser make for unexpected bedfellows to be sure, but Breton leads Blanton to discern meaningful connections between the philosopher’s notion of the interpellation of subjectivity and the apostle’s notion of the klesis that veritably calls us into being. The gain is to see in Paul’s proclamation of a crucified messiah and its consequence an exemplary instance of the subversion of the givenness of things arising from the sorts of irrepressible instabilities at the base of reality. The extended exposition is shot through with language aimed to evoke just this: the talk is of gaps, of dispossession, of disruption, of unpredictable and irrepressible voids, of the form of the messianic as the “potential detachment, unhinging, or bracketing of the “special kind of obviousness” by which our world” owns and makes us (79).

Here we arrive at what I take to be centre of gravity in the argument of the book as a whole, namely the final pages of the chapter entitled, “On Being Called Dead,” where Blanton sets out Breton’s account of the kenosis of the Paulinist God and the concomitant negative anthropology to which it gives rise (83–95). Paul’s theology of the cross is taken to underwrite the overthrow of ideology tout court, as Blanton puts it: by placing a kenotic “pale void” at the heart of reality itself, i.e., by making “the dispossessing madness of love within Pauline divinity” (89) the fundament of Paul’s teaching, the enclosure of all cultural forms, ideological totalities and biopolitical embrace are broken open and destabilised. Analogous to the clinamen there is founding rupture, a self-dispossession, something meontological placed at the root of it all, undermining the triumphal logics of identity and “destroying” the forms of power that make the world and we in it. These theological ideas of Paul’s in fact articulate a materialist politics of resistance, authorising a “lived surging of transformative insurgency into the paradeigmata of cultural setup” (88). In the figure of the messiah on the cross believers encounter and are overcome by an “unjustified nature [ ] which does not temper its forceful emergence,” an uncanny force which unhinges lived life so as to enjoin “intensive, self-forgetful enthusiasm” and thereby threatens to break open and change everything (89–90). Paul thereby announces a destabilising absence, a revolutionary “subtraction” that mimics at the level of human identity and agency that inestimable atomic deflection from which all motion and so possibility as such arise. Such is the unwelcome teaching of the apostle, a teaching subsequently silenced by an act of ideological “sanctification” constitutive of both the institution of the church, and western onto-theology. Such is the good news of Blanton’s materialist spirituality and the heart of its political imperative. We have here, as the final chapters go on to make manifest, a programmatic sketch of a highly theoretical materialist philosophy of human hope fully at home within the “immanent frame” with Paul as its patron saint.

For a theologically inclined reader like myself, the argument offers significant provocation and gives rise to many questions, only a few of which we are able to raise here.

(1)  Would Blanton have us understand Paul’s proclamation as an actual historical religious refraction of epicurean materialism, such that, while we might find it rhetorically bracing and historically interesting, it is ultimately fully reducible as regards to its truth to a properly theorised materialist metaphysics? Is Paul’s teaching, in other words, rightly heard as the “strong poetry” (Rorty) of an ancient soul well attuned to the atomic glitch at the base of all things? Do we have influence or merely analogy on display here?

(2)  Would Blanton have us take materialist metaphysics or the discursive business of cultural political theory as “first philosophy’? Can the latter rightly be reduced to an epiphenomenon of atomic deviation, even if a vast and complex one? Or, does the prominence of contemporary theory in the argument suggest rather that materialist metaphysics is but another discursive trace of what are fundamentally and irreducibly human psycho-social and cultural dynamics? Ought we to understand the vision as a materialist spirituality or a spiritualist materialism? Is there anything at stake in such questions?

(3)  Can we be serious about Paul and the humane insurrection against the “powers that be” that his teaching represents, enjoins and enables without being equally serious about the God who Paul acknowledges and proclaims to be the sole whence of such genuinely transgressive agency? What would it look like to attempt to do so within the ambit of a theoretical project such as this? Does a methodical commitment to “purely immanent, secularizing—or this-worlding—critique” mean that we must in principle be unable and/or unwilling to take Paul on his own terms in this regard, and so are required to translate such talk of God without remainder into new naturalised tropes for our always evasive and uncanny experience of “transcendence” in the midst of life? Or beyond such discursive manoeuvres, does critical theory in fact properly explain away Paul’s talk of deity in fully immanent terms, as one might consider is done in the many of the psychoanalytic and philosophical sources upon which the project draws? Colin Gunton once observed that Karl Barth had effectively dismissed the theological significance of Rudolf Otto’s concept of God’s holiness with the remark that “holiness is not a shudder down the spine.” 1Could it perhaps be asked whether and why, on Blanton’s account, we ought to place lay our hope for free human action and the liberation of human lives upon the ambient flicker at the edge of our consciousness brought about the random deviations and fissures that haunt material causality? Do the psychic traces of the clinamen really afford the basis and means on which to venture of disposed life of faith, hope and love in the teeth of the apparatuses of late modern capitalism?

(4)  The discussion of Romans 7 (157–61) in relation to Pasolini’s screenplay Saint Paul raises the question of the form or moral horizon of the idea of transgression. The question is, “How are we able to think, to be, transgression, sin, crime, once power becomes identified with normalizing bios, with life itself?” (159). As the subsequent discussion makes clear what it is issue for Blanton is the sheer possibility of transgression as such, whether the irrepressible eruption of the “other law” of sin or the unearned advent of divine grace and salvation “apart from the law,” seems neither here nor there at this juncture. Whether sin or grace, it is the prospect and reality of the uncontrolled, the ill-disciplined per se that excites the theorist here. This formalism of “transgression” seems to run counter to the previously positive recommendation of the very specifically formed notions of the dispossessed self that is drawn from Breton. Is it possible that the argument at this point reduplicates the antinomian moment in Paul’s own work—”shall we sin all the more?’—but without following the apostle’s own answer, namely the suggestion that the promeity of divine grace that transgresses the law can and will give rise to a correspondingly transgressive love that pours out one’s life for others? Must the telos of transgression not be taken fundamentally into account if we hope to keep faith with Paul here?

(5)  Finally, I wonder whether Blanton’s work illumines in any way the central point at issue in the debate played out between J.L. Martyn and Troels Engberg-Pedersen concerning Paul’s relation to Stoicism.2 Both scholars charge the other with illegimate katachronistic interpretations of Paul. Martyn contests the historiographical propriety and interpretative value of Engberg-Pedersen’s reading of Paul “from without” and in “naturalististic” terms and categories drawn from modern self-understanding. Engberg-Pedersen in turn charges that Martyn’s reading was inappropriately theological by virtue of bringing Paul’s first-century categories and modes of thought forward into the present as if they were plausible modes of contemporary thought. On one reading, Blanton’s interpretative posture would seem to move in both these directions, with contemporary categories of thought bringing to light aspects of Pauline teaching and the elements of that ancient teaching illuminating contemporary reflection on the possibilities of living humanely in our day and age. However, in other respects Blanton is also open to being taken to be a variation solely of Engberg-Pedersen’s posture without the reciprocal movement. However this may be, ought we to worry about the prospect for, and legitimacy of, katachronistic readings of Paul, or katachronistic readings of our contemporary situation in light of Paul?

Whether such questions and concerns are well formed, or whether they betray a perspective on Blanton’s book which ineptly hopes to understand and appreciate it from a perspective which the work itself imagines to have overreached, I myself am unsure. In any event, I look forward to learning more from the exchanges with the author to which these remarks and the other reviews in this series give rise.

Nearly a decade ago I reported on the Religion, Postmodernism, and Culture conference held at Syracuse University on the topic of the contemporary interest in and appropriation of the figure of the Apostle Paul amongst Continental philosophers.1 My report began with Nietzsche’s critique of, and contempt for, Paul—for his role as the presumed originator of Christianity and as the progenitor of a certain Platonism for the masses, and even more fundamentally, for what Nietzsche interprets as his “relentless logic of hatred” and the grand irony of how Paul, the chief messenger of Christ, is in fact the figure of the anti-Christ par excellence. Nietzsche’s condemnation still looms large. Even with the contemporary “reactivation of Paul” led by the likes of Alain Badiou that has centered on the revolutionary political dimension of Paul’s thought, what I failed to understand then was just how docile, uncritical, and predictable the (re)reading of Paul has been. If it is true that everything is a footnote to Plato, then so too is it the case that the reception and invocation of Paul—whether it is sympathetic or critical, whether traditional or deconstructive—can be read like an annotated bibliography with the parameters well-established and the contours well-tread. What is missing, and perhaps even unthinkable, is the shock of the new, not for the sake of novelty, but to prove there might still be some life in this worked-over corpse.

It is with this in mind that I suggest we recall how utterly startling were the claims from Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, both in terms of how adventurous and unsubstantiated: Moses was not actually a Hebrew, but an Egyptian prince; he did not worship Yahweh, but the Egyptian sun god Aten; he did not die a natural death, but was murdered by the very people he delivered from captivity. The Moses received by the tradition is a myth retroactively developed, an act of collective repression that all but erased the memory not only of the man, but also of the strict moral-monotheism that stood in such stark contrast to the tribal cult of the violent deity Yahweh and the bloody sacrificial rituals Yahweh required. In the words of Daniel Pals, “There is no question that this quite extraordinary retelling of Hebrew history as Freud sees it rests on a number of adventurous connections and eye-opening historical conjectures that would trouble both the historian and the biblical scholar.” Nevertheless, Pals continues, “Much more interesting to [Freud] is the mystery of how, over many centuries, a true monotheism was somehow born, apparently died, and then came back to life. How can it be, he asks, that the faith of the original Moses virtually disappeared from the life of his people, only to revive centuries later in dramatic fashion and win back the hearts and minds of the entire Jewish community?”2

More than any other, it is this work from Freud, rich in theory and full of conjecture, that I regard as the true inspiration for Ward Blanton’s radical recasting of the Apostle Paul in his most recent book, A Materialism for the Masses. The difference, and it is not an insignificant one, is where Freud’s conjectures are presented as facts, Blanton’s are offered as a gambit, or as an extended thought experiment that cuts through and beneath the layers of generational, ideological, institutional, cultural and theological sediment to unearth not so much the “original” or “historical” Paul, but more the possibility of an insurrectionary Paulism. Less a retrieval than a new creation, Blanton’s Paul is a new Paul for a new, non-reductive and non-representational materialism. In so being, Blanton delivers on the nearly unthinkable: the shock of the new by unearthing the undead, or even better, the undying life, of Paul.

Which brings me to my title: if not a retrieval of the original Paul, then who or what is being unearthed in this unearthing of the dead? In Heideggerian fashion, it is partly no doubt a certain forgotten, neglected, or obscured Paul. This is decidedly not the Paul as received into the tradition as the founder of a supersessionist (read: anti-Jewish) new religion by the name of Christianity. This is not the Paul of The Acts of the Apostles, which, in the words of Blanton, by its “archetypical reification of identity” performs “identity’s retroactive sublimation or imagination as a given, unchanging foundation” (23) through and by the figure of Paul who thereby becomes the culprit and purveyor of the conflation of “those Jews” with “bad Israelites” and the formal distantiation of nascent Christianity from Judaism. This is neither the heroic Paul of Eusebius, Augustine, Luther, or Barth, nor the anti-heroic Paul of Nietzsche, Freud, Derrida, or Foucault—and this is the surprise: whether Paul is regarded as a hero or anti-hero, whether he is invoked or retrieved as a means to restore Christianity to its essence, or rejected or repudiated as the great swindler trafficking in metaphysical dualisms and an otherworldly escapism, these representations of Paul amount to one and the same thing.

Blanton, by contrast, refuses the machinations of this “beatification-and-occultation” Paul complex; he refuses to repeat this engrained Paulism. Beyond the hero worship and likewise beyond the dismissal and excoriation, Blanton shows how this historical archive is more like a tomb. Meanwhile, Paul’s corpse is hidden in plain sight—buried, unearthed, and buried over again. The script is well-known: Paul, the apostle to the gentiles, the true founder of Christianity as a religion of its own separate and distinct from Judaism, the one who translates Jesus’ messianic movement in Greco-Hellenistic terms by baptizing a kind of pop-Platonism for the masses, and thereby one of the architects of Western civilization as we know it by encoding such categories as the West, Christianity, Judaism, and religion with as clear and certain a meaning as its legacy.

But it is not this dead and worked-over corpse that Blanton is interested in. On the contrary, Blanton invokes what he calls the “undying life” that has only been only hinted at in fits and starts and that is marked above all by its ephemerality. Again, the surprise is where Nietzsche reads Paul’s talk of the scandal of the cross and the making of weakness as a virtue as resentiment, Blanton shows how this apparent otherworldliness is not the product of Paul’s metaphysical dualism, but a statement of Paul’s actual political stance. He does not hate the world in general, but the specific world of Roman colonial power and imperial oppression. He is not otherworldly, but an immanent insurrectionist. In other words, Paul’s supposed slave morality that defies Nietzsche’s will-to-power might just as well be an expression of Paul’s solidarity with a militarily suppressed minority. By making a virtue out of weakness, Paul is charting a form of theo-political resistance to instrumental control.

To be sure, Nietzsche is not the only culprit of this (mis)representation of Paul. Blanton also shows the ways that both Derrida and Foucault are guilty of “docility,” “laziness,” “dogmatism,” “conservatism,” and an “unreflective traditionalism” when it comes to their rather uncritical reading of Paul. These words are not often used to describe either Derrida or Foucault, but as Blanton persuasively argues, their respective readings of Paul are derivative of Nietzsche. They accept without question the representation of Paul as the founder of the Christian identity. And as such, they stand in basic agreement with a figure such as the nineteenth-century antimodernist German biblical scholar Theodor Zahn, repeating and reifying, even while repudiating, a certain Christian identity as representation. So while Zahn champions and seeks to restore this representative identity, Derrida and Foucault leave the identity intact and unscathed by what amounts to a simple and straightforward rejection of Paul that does not nearly rise to a proper deconstructive standard. As Blanton puts it, they merely refuse, rather than resituate the coordinates of the terrain, even while giving a diametrically opposed value judgment of its legacy.

The problem here is that their failure represents a missed opportunity to undercut the true basis of the Christian ontotheological claims to truth and power. Nietzsche, Derrida, and Foucault must be read against themselves. Witness here the contrast of Stanislas Breton: by his reading of Paul, we understand how we may come to see Paul not as the founder of the Christian identity, but as Christianity’s first and greatest critic of identitarian forms of thought altogether. Paul represents a “founding rupture” (83), or the “dispossession and failure of identity” (91). Breton’s Paul is a theo-political thinker of the void. And the lesson Blanton draws from this is how Breton’s reactivation of Paul is not under some reformational guise, as if to restore pristine Christianity in its original purity. On the contrary, it is an act of creation. As Breton once said, which Blanton invokes both here and elsewhere, “Authentic Christianity is not behind us: it is in front of us.”3 This is the truly radical act of dispossession of Christian identity and displacement of Christian origins that Nietzsche, Derrida, and Foucault have in mind, but never achieve thanks to their essentially straightforward acceptance of a representation of an identity of Paul as retroactively constructed by a tradition that he himself might have preemptively deconstructed and short-circuited.4

To me, the real value in this startling act of conjecture on the part of Blanton is the way that Paul might be read for his political theology of power and resistance. More specifically, Blanton’s Paul, who is not just post-Lutheran or post-Nietzschean (which amounts to the same thing), and who is post-Christian as much as he is pre-Christian (which again amounts to the same thing), provides a historically actualized theory of insurrection. By drawing on Jacques Lacan and Judith Butler and with repeated reference to the Italian radical political filmmaker Pier Paulo Pasolini, Blanton takes their point about the nature of resistance in the culture of late capitalism wherein the biopolitical indicates “the impossibility of (‘classical’) emancipation” (134). What analysis shows, according to Lacan, “is very precisely the fact that we don’t ever transgress” (168). Likewise for Pasolini, his works become increasingly preoccupied with what the false idea of freedom; or as Blanton puts it, an “awareness of the structural or economic ambiguity of transgression” (169) in the new economy of power that leaves us with the question:

How, after all, does one resist when mechanisms of power are imagined not to come from a repressive outside but to emerge by way of a new and populace-wide apparatuses of measurement, all those mechanisms by which the new economy of power attempts to more effectively proliferate “life”? Much more pointedly, . . . the real question for resistance in the new economy of power is this: how does one resist when power is that which is imagined to be making the mode or way life is the way life is? (136)

But while we might not ever transgress, there are nevertheless “detours of power” (179) that Blanton labels in the final section of the final chapter as “seizures of chance” (179–81). These chance opportunities provide the permanent possibility to undo, or render ineffective, the power of power, or “to destabilize the very force of normativity” (178) in a “world without transgression” (179). “You have died,” Blanton has Paul translated to say, so “Why do you submit?” Paul is preaching a “virtue of recalcitrance” (159) that originates not from outside of the law or power, but from within. This is a powerful insurrectionary force that in the words of Baudrillard contains “the incalculable force of the implosion” (160). By considering yourself already dead, you are then free to make a mockery of the biopolitical machinations of control, which is precisely what Blanton suggests Paul was up to as a “wandering vagabond of a crucified messiah [who] organized a cell of little ‘crucifieds,’ parodically taking the sting out of the effective imperial forcefulness that counted Jesus as one of the serial repressions constitutive of the maintenance of empire” (161).

This is the “Paulinist insurgency” that Blanton has in mind. It is a theo-political theory and praxis of power and resistance that is as ephemeral as it is risky due to its admission to its own extreme vulnerability and more generally to the precariousness of life. More radical than repudiation (read: Nietzsche) or reformation (read: Luther), this is the shock of the new that may just be what is left behind after this particular unearthing of the dead.