Robert Oventile

English Division
Pasadena City College
rsoventile@pasadena.edu

 

Review of: Jennings, Theodore W., Jr. Reading Derrida/Thinking Paul: On Justice.Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005.

 

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).

 

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?

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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).

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.