Mark Cousins, Parveen Adams
The work of this course is part of the larger problem of the meaning and the ceaseless process of reinterpretation of figures and writings within Christianity. It will concentrate upon the figure of St Paul. Clearly the narrative of his life and the life of his letters have been central in the history of Christian belief from the very beginning of the emergence of a Christian community, through its role in the elaboration of Christianity as a church in St Augustine and indeed in the role it played for Luther in the Reformation. Nor is his role limited to a purely Christian dimension; St Paul remains a potent figure whose significance is not exhausted by purely religious questions. Recently there has been a renewed interest in Paul as he seems to bisect with an axis of contemporary philosophical, political and ethical issues such as authorisation, law, hospitality, universality and community. Texts by figures such as Taubes, Badiou, Agamben and Derrida are an index of this.
Introductory Reading:
Garry Wills, What Paul Meant (London: Penguin 2007)
Geza Vermes, The Changing Faces of Jesus (London: Penguin 2001)
Karen Armstrong, The Bible: A Biography (London: Atlantic, 2007)
One: St Paul’s Conversion and Ministry
A historical and textual introduction to the conversion of St Paul and the nature of the teaching which he undertook in his voyages.
Reading:
The Acts of the Apostles
Saint Paul, Epistle to the Romans
Two: Effects on Christian doctrine
Political problems of Paul’s ministry - the relation of Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians, starting with the difference between St Paul and St Peter and opening onto more general questions of the claims of exclusivity and universality in respect to the Christian subject.
Reading:
Bernhard Lohse, Martin Luther: An Introduction to His Life and Work (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986)
Three: Jacob Taubes
Fundamental to the contemporary interpretation of St Paul from the point of Judaism is the work of Jacob Taubes.
Reading:
Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, ed. Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann, trans. Dana Hollander (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004)
Four: St Paul, Philosophy and Politics
Since the eclipse of Marxism and the collapse of communism, critics of existing social and political arrangements have found it difficult to find a language which would be appropriate to a renewed radical project. This problem has produced a renewed engagement with St Paul.
Reading:
Alain Badiou, St Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003)
Theodore W. Jennings, Reading Derrida/Thinking Paul (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006)
Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005)
Five: Love Your Neighbour
The Biblical injunction to love your neighbour was sharply questioned by both Freud and Lacan. Their arguments continue to disrupt ethics which are founded upon uncritical assumptions concerning the neighbour or the community.
Reading:
Sigmund Freud, Civilisation and Its Discontents, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol 21 (London: Vintage, 2001), pp. 64-145
Eric Santner, ‘Miracles Happen: Benjamin, Rosenzweig, Freud, and the Matter of the Neighbor’, in Slavoj Žižek, Eric Santner and Kenneth Reinhard, The Neighbour: Three Inquiries in Political Ontology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005)
Six: Pasolini’s St Paul
These film projects, unlike the philosophical attempts to reconstruct the relevance of St Paul, directly introject his figure into contemporary politics.
Reading:
Pier Paolo Pasolini, San Paolo (Turin: Einaudi, 1977). Saint Paul, trans (from Italian into French), Giovanni Joppolo (Paris: Flammarion, 1980).
