Tuesday, December 07, 2004
(1:56 PM) | Anonymous:
Saint Paul Week: Toward St. Paul and the Foundations of Schizoanalysis
I'm hoping to have another post in on this by the end of the week. Hopefully what I am doing here is not pretending to like Paul by attaching his ideas to another thinker, but I'm not going to feel guilty about it if that is, indeed, what this turns out to be.Nietzsche often takes Paul to task for slave morality, meaning a reactive as opposed to creative spirit, but Taubes suggests that all of this resentment of Nietzsche's lies simply in Paul's revaluation of all values. Paul clearly is undertaking such a revaluation in the 7th chapter of Romans, where he devalues the law and gives value to the spirit of life. We don't see in Paul the spirit of pure nihilism, whose aim is to destroy everything not of its none-self. Paul clearly rejects the power of the law, but he does so by affirming it (Yes! Yes!).
The textual evidence leads me to believe this law is not merely the Torah. As I understand it (Ryan correct me if I'm wrong) Romans was written to a Gentile community in Rome, and while surely addressing "Do I need to be a Jew?" problem, it seems safe to say that this law is also the kind "written in the hearts of men." Though we may try to Protestantize this and suggest that this was merely a way of making people control themselves so the state doesn't have to, as Nietzsche undoubtedly did, such a reading is uncharitable to Paul. The law was a cultural brute fact, just as much as a table or Moby Dick or the menu at McDonald's. Paul could not simply ignore the law, and so he subverts it by overcoding its power over people.
The first move in overcoding the law is to give it life, following Jewish traditional teaching about the Torah. Such a living law can only live when the relationships it governs are alive as well. Thus freedom from comes when those relationships are severed, through death here, which is absolutized by the death of Christ (more on that later in the week). Paul wants to hold Christ as the higher law, one which makes one free from captivity towards a "new life of the Spirit." Yet the old law code is still there, and people still feel bound to it and even value the way it works in their lives. Paul must overcode the law.
To devalue currency, you create more currency and flood the market with it. A similar logic is at work in Paul; to devalue the law, you increase its power till it collapses on itself. The odd dialogue from verses 7-13 is this overcoding. Here the law is made, in its goodness (he is still affirming its value), a handmaiden of sin. Sin, that which haunts anyone in the sight of God, is found to be a dialectical element of the law. "Apart from the law sin lies dead. I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin revived." This is so odd! He has given to the law, the power of sin, the power of death. Yet we already saw the law was life! Its domain is not to enter into death, and yet it is tied intimately to death. As such it must be abolished, the law as currency is no longer valuable and something higher must come and take its place.
This is a sketch of Paul's devaluation of the law, hopefully this will prove helpful later when I try and explain the schizoid nature of this chapter of Romans. I am fully willing to admit that this is all bunk, but I will accept no guilt.
