If there's one thing that reveals to me the poverty of contemporary left thinking, it's the way Agamben, Badiou, Zizek and now, I'm hearing it on YouTube as I write this, Simon Critchley, bang on about St. Paul as if he was the greatest man to change his mind, ever.
Come on. Paul was and is used by Evangelicals as a big stick to beat people with—that's what I remember from all the Bible studies I had the misfortune of attending, when I was briefly peer-pressured into Christianity at age 13. At a school called St. Paul's...believe me the school was not into revolution.
Doesn't it enable these guys to sound pious? Spilt religion anyone?
And another thing. The amazingness of his changing his mind must have something to do with the amazingness of the contents of his mind. If you really aren't into Christianity I would have thought it would be a better idea not to keep on reproducing the Paul meme. Does anyone else feel this way? I mean I've just had it with this Paul stuff!
Have you read much of the Paul stuff? I haven't read it all, but Badiou's book is interesting, and Agamben's is exception. I'm not sure if you are saying that books on Paul should be prima facie rejected or if there is something wrong with how contemporary thinkers are writing about him.
ReplyDeleteYes, I've read all. I have a visceral reaction of disgust to all of it.
ReplyDeleteWhy? Just because it's about Paul?
ReplyDeleteMade me remember Cioran: "We can never punish [St. Paul] enough for making Christianity impolite, for saddling it with the nastiest traditions of the Old Testament: intolerance, brutality, provincialism. He was the first barker of the Greco-Roman world. Whenever I am at a loss for a scapegoat, I open the Epistles and am quickly reassured. I have my man, and he rouses me to a fury."
ReplyDeletehttp://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,902270,00.html
Yes, Cioran can help... And yet his negative perspective, even while true, just reminds me all the more to keep returning to Buddhism. Buddhas have a nicer way of wiping down the mud from you, as well as wiping your ass for you, and then setting you on your way again... at least, if you can't help jumping right back into the mud puddle, you have a better sense what it is (and isn't).
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ReplyDeleteStrikes me Zizek doesn't know Paul 'from the inside' - he uses Paul as a sort of tool or heuristic device, but if you have lived and breathed Paul - as an evangelical, Pentecostal, or Calvinist (and survived) you will know something of the damage his words can do.
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