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Paul and political theology: Nihilism, empire and the messianic vocation
Gideon Baker
Philosophy Social Criticism published online 27 November 2014
DOI: 10.1177/0191453714559533

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Philosophy and Social Criticism

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Paul and political theology: The Author(s) 2014
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messianic vocation

Gideon Baker
Griffith University, Queensland, Australia

Abstract
Nihilism, for Nietzsche, is the nothing that results from the devaluation of the highest values. There
is widespread agreement with Nietzsches claim that the apostle Paul was the great devaluer of the
values of the ancient world, even to the extent of breaking the history of the world in two. Yet the
mode of Pauls devaluating nihilism is contested. Using Nietzsches three types of nihilist, I frame
this debate over Paul as giving us, respectively, Paul the reactive nihilist (Nietzsche), Paul the active
nihilist (Taubes) and Paul the overman (Badiou). I then read Agambens messianic Paul as a way to
avoid the problem of nihilism tout court, which the two earlier accounts, despite releasing Paul from
Nietzsches charge of passive nihilism, do not. I finish by arguing that while Agambens construction
of the Pauline messianic vocation does indeed break with Nietzsches categories of nihilism,
nihilism remains necessary to a genealogy of both Pauls and Agambens messianism.

Keywords
Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Gnosticism, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacob Taubes

Introduction
Interpretations of the apostle Paul in modern philosophy, starting with Nietzsche, could
hardly be more divergent. Yet something significant is at stake in this range of readings,
which I propose to illuminate through the categories of nihilism as understood by
Nietzsche. Nihilism, for Nietzsche, at its most basic, is the nothingness that results from
the devaluation of the highest values. We shall see that Nietzsches three types of
nihilist the reactive nihilist, the active nihilist and the post-nihilistic overman frame

Corresponding author:
Gideon Baker, School of Government and International Relations, Griffith University, Gold Coast, Queensland
4215, Australia.
Email: g.baker@griffith.edu.au

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2 Philosophy and Social Criticism

nicely three of the most significant interpretations of Paul that we have: Nietzsches own
(where Paul is viewed as a reactive nihilist); Jacob Taubes (where Paul is seen as an
active, even revolutionary, nihilist driven by an eschatological nihilism); and Alain
Badious (where Paul is something of an overman in his positing of new values, specif-
ically the value of universalism).1
Yet while they position Paul very differently in relation to nihilism, all three of these
readings of course thereby continue to tie Paul to the problem of nihilism. That is, even if
Taubes and Badiou release Paul from Nietzsches charge of reactive or resentful nihi-
lism, they continue to insist that Paul should be understood in relation to the transvalua-
tion of values itself, whether this is the destruction of old values (Taubes) or the creation
of new ones (Badiou). Even in the latter case the creation of new values as in Badious
reading there must still first be a devaluing of the old values, in which case nihilism
remains necessary as the passage to some beyond to nihilism, as it does also for
Nietzsche, of course.
What values does Paul negate, then? There is general agreement with Nietzsche from
both Taubes and Badiou that Paul is the great devaluer of the highest values of antiquity.
First, Paul devalues hierarchy as an essential difference between freemen and slaves.
Paul either inverts this hierarchy, as in Nietzsches charge that the Christianity that Paul
invents is historys great slave revolt, or transcends it, as in Badious account of Pauls
universalism, where those who are one in Christ are no longer defined as slaves or free-
men (Galatians 3:28). The spurious universalism of ancient cosmopolitanism is for
Badiou exposed (as also its modern variants) by Pauls egalitarian version. Cosmopoli-
tanism is a hierarchical universalism which remains imperial, as in the figure of Marcus
Aurelius, at once Roman emperor and Stoic citizen of the world. Taubes, too, sees Paul
as first and foremost an anti-imperial figure whose eschatological theology is at once
political and whose nihilistic politics is immediately theological.
Second, Paul devalues communalism as an essential difference between Jews and
Greeks. Nietzsche argues that communalism is overcome by Paul as the first Christian
of the first non-national religion, just as he bemoans the loss of these national gods.2
Badiou, who rather celebrates this accomplishment, agrees that the form of Pauls uni-
versalism, being that of a universalizable singularity (the resurrection), belongs to every-
one and therefore to no one in particular. Taubes and Badiou also concur that
communalism is overturned in Paul by his repeated emphasis on the pas, the all, in con-
tradistinction to those Jewish Christians who sought in some way to preserve Israels
special election, if only through the continuation of Jewish customs and rites such as
circumcision.3
Third, Paul devalues law as the ordering principle of the cosmos. Pauls critique of
law in Taubes view attacks not just specific forms of law for example, pharisaical Jew-
ish law but the generalized apotheosis of nomos characteristic of late antiquity.4
Badiou concurs that Pauls deactivation of law is very profound, proposing as it does
nothing other than a trans- or non-literal law of love where it is a matter of subjective
fidelity to truths rather than being bound to objective norms (the laws of nature or of the
universe).5 This is an assault on the Greek cosmos itself in that it substitutes the law as
that which is due (hence the laws particular and partial character) for its opposite: that
grace which comes freely, without being due (in other words: universally or for all).6

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Baker 3

Nothing other than a breaking of the history of the world in two results (something
Nietzsche himself attempted but, in falling short of, was broken by).7
Fourth, in devaluing law, Paul also devalues cosmos; and this indeed could serve as a
heading for the first three devaluations named above. Cosmos is the conviction (recalling
the etymology that would take cosmos back to the verb kosmein [to order or arrange])
that the order of things is an everlasting totality.8 Against this, Taubes Paul is a
Gnostic-apocalyptic who expects the imminent end of the present form of this world
(I Corinthians 7:2931). Badious Paul, meanwhile, establishes the event of the resurrec-
tion as a world-historical rupture with the allotting of places and orders characteristic of
cosmos. It is the egalitarian for all of the resurrection, rather than the One of cosmos,
where the latter is a matter of adapting oneself to the totality by knowing ones place in
it.9 Thus the devaluation of cosmos is linked intimately to the overcoming of hierarchy,
communalism and law, which also work, can only work, by finding distinctions (recal-
ling that nomos derives from nemo [to divide or to assign]).
In sum, though they evaluate the rupture with antiquity that is Paul differently, both
Taubes and Badiou, following Nietzsche, agree that Paul is a break with everything that
the ancients held to be most true, that Pauls teaching of the cross of foolishness (I Cor-
inthians 1:20) equals a slap in the face of the noble ethos of antiquity.10 In this sense all
concur on one theme: Paul is, in Nietzsches sense of the term, a thoroughgoing nihilist.
Having established this much, we can now see the significance of the messianic Paul
offered by Giorgio Agamben. Only Agambens Paul escapes the framing of nihilism
neither devaluing this world nor pronouncing a new one (the latter which, to repeat, first
requires this same devaluation), but rather opening up this world for use. This messianic
Paul would also deal in critique of the old and hope for the new, but this would not take
the form of a linear operation in time but rather a mode of relation to the present. Such a
messianic time sees openings in the time of the now [ho nyn kairos], rather than receiving
openness from the future to come (pace Derrida). To be sure, even this messianic voca-
tion in Agambens Paul requires that this world be passing away (hence the importance
of the negation of the figures of this world, as in Pauls use of the formulation hos me [as
not]). However, Agamben denies that this negation implies the nihilistic idea of another,
better world in Paul, arguing that nothing in Pauls messianic vocation tends towards the
elsewhere.
Reading Paul within the framework of nihilism is helpful because nihilism is fre-
quently pronounced to be a very contemporary problem, and Paul is thereby rendered
our contemporary. For Badiou, the radicalism of nihilism today is such that there is no
longer any world at all.11 The exclusive reign of the sign of enjoyment involves either a
libertarian de-linking from the world, where the world is nothing but a system of links, or
the liberal attempt to purchase enjoyment, which is strictly impossible since enjoyment is
forever without an equivalent in the manner of the commodity. If Nietzsche is to be
believed, the Christianity founded by Paul masked its own nihilism by displacing all
value onto the world to come, thus devaluing this world in spectacular fashion. But with
the death of God, itself an inevitable outcome of the Platonic-Christian will to truth, the
highest values of Christendom have, in turn, been devalued (in truth, have devalued
themselves), which is both the predicament and opportunity of European modernity. If
we accept Nietzsches history of nihilism, then there is no way out of its predicament,

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4 Philosophy and Social Criticism

no way of seizing its opportunity, other than via the overman, who is the other side of the
rope over the abyss of nothingness that is man in his dangerous crossing away from his
animal origins.12 Only this joyfully creative creature, this bringer of new values, can be
an answer to the nothing; and he will be a long time coming.
But if Agamben is right that the Pauline messianic vocation enables a creative new
relation to the present time and to the subjectivities that we already find there, must
we wait? Must we understand our predicament in terms of the need for destructioncre-
ation, namely in terms of nihilism, at all? The implications of this question for our con-
ception of the political, indeed for all practical philosophy, are very extensive indeed.
For example, rather than understanding the political in terms of the possibilities for rev-
olutionary new times and new subjects, with all the destitution of the old that this pre-
sumes, it would become possible to see the political as an ongoing deactivation of all
worldly figures of power which operates not in the name of some new figure of power,
but rather as the profanation of existing ones.
I will now deal briefly with Nietzsches distinction between active and reactive nihi-
lism before turning to the three readings of Paul as, respectively, reactive nihilist
(Nietzsche), active nihilist (Taubes) and overman (Badiou). I will then introduce Agam-
bens messianic Paul as a way to sidestep the trap of nihilism that Nietzsche has laid for
us and which the two earlier readings, despite their many merits, will not enable us to
avoid. Finally, I will argue that while Agambens construction of the Pauline messianic
vocation does indeed break with Nietzsches categories of nihilism, nihilism remains an
irreducible part of the genealogy of Pauls messianism. This argument will require con-
sideration of the Gnostic Paul. In his attempt to identify Pauls messianism with the
here-and-now, Agamben largely ignores Gnostic aspects of Pauls teaching. Agambens
reasoning here seems to be that Gnosticism nihilistically tends towards the elsewhere,
but I will suggest that the Gnosticism of late antiquity shared significant features with
Agambens reading of Pauls messianic vocation as involving the negation of worldly
powers and so need not be excluded in this way. I also point out that such negation, even
if it is interpreted messianically rather than Gnostically, is genealogically inseparable
from the eschatology that was inaugurated by apocalypticism. In this way, nihilism, in
the form of apocalypticism, is seen to be necessary to a genealogy of Pauls, and indeed
Agambens, messianism,

Nietzsches active and passive nihilism

In an instructive section of his Late Notebooks (notebook 9, autumn 1887), Nietzsche
sets out the difference between active and passive nihilism.13 Nietzsche admits that nihi-
lism as the condition under which the highest values are devalued is, in itself, ambig-
uous.14 To be sure, nihilism can be a sign of weakness and weariness at life, of the
decline and retreat of the spirits power.15 Such passive nihilism, finding that tradi-
tional values have become inoperative, seeks solace in soothing, even benumbing, balms
such as religion and morality. But there is an active nihilism, too. This nihilism is rather
a sign of the increased power of the spirit, of strength, in that it does not passively find
itself lacking the old values, but rather actively outgrows them.16 Active nihilism is not
yet strong enough to proactively posit new goals or beliefs, in which case it would no

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Baker 5

longer be nihilism at all. It thus remains a pathological intermediate state in which the
inference that there is no meaning at all always threatens and in which:17

It achieves its maximum of relative force as active force of destruction: as active nihilism.
The opposite would be the weary nihilism that no longer attacks: its most celebrated form
Buddhism, as passivist [sic] nihilism.18

Nonetheless, as the second sentence of this passage hints, active nihilism, despite its incom-
pleteness and its dangers, remains an intermediate, and therefore necessary, stage in the
overcoming of nihilism. As Nietzsche had admitted a short time before in a note (8[2]) from
the summer of 1887, hatred of a world in which we suffer takes the form of the imagination
of a different and valuable world, and here ressentiment towards the real is creative.19

The reactive Paul

Nietzsche gets on to Paul in the first book of his mature work, Daybreak (1881), where
he identifies him as the founder of Christianity, as the first Christian (since, without
Paul, Jesus would have remained the property of an obscure Jewish sect).20 Nietzsche
seeks to portray Paul as tormented and self-lacerating, but also as cunning and ambitious.
The source of this deformed character? That Paul, enforcer of the strict observance of
Jewish law, found that he himself could not fulfil it, and thus came to hate it, seeking
now for ways to destroy, rather than observe, the law. Pauls vision on the road to
Damascus is, for Nietzsche, the moment when Paul sees a way to revenge himself on law
by identifying the risen Christ as laws destroyer. From this moment, and Nietzsche can-
not hide his jealousy here, history will revolve around Paul as the one who announces the
death of law in life with Christ. The latter part of this equation, in Nietzsches eyes, is
what reveals Pauls true intentions: [W]ith the idea of becoming one with Christ all
shame, all subordination, all bounds are taken from it [Pauls soul], and the intractable
lust for power reveals itself as an anticipatory revelling in divine glories.21
Nietzsche does not return to Paul until his last writings, where Paul is taken up again in his
late notebooks (notebook 10, autumn 1887). Here Nietzsche argues that Pauls genius was
to have recognized that the Jewish diasporas nay-saying to Roman power and magnificence
was itself a form of power that could be exploited.22 Soon thereafter, Paul becomes the chief
target of Nietzsches polemic in The Anti-Christ (written in the second half of 1888). As in
his recent notebook entry, Nietzsche resumes where he left off in Daybreak, arguing that
Paul, as an archetype of the priestly kind, had an interest in making mankind sick through
the inversion of concepts such as good and evil, which now denigrated what is noble
and strong and elevated that which is decadent and weak.23 What was this interest? To
attain power. Such power was attained man was made sick primarily through the
de-emphasizing of Christs teachings, which Nietzsche sees as preaching a guilt-free union
between man and God in the here and now, and instead shifting the emphasis to Christs
death, which was now interpreted as a guilt sacrifice the reward for which is eternal life
in the hereafter.24 Nietzsches claim is clear: Paul has devalued this world in the name of
the world to come in the interests of establishing (his) priestly power. The driver of this will
to power is, in Pauls case, ressentiment; Paul was the greatest of all apostles of revenge:25

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6 Philosophy and Social Criticism

One sees what comes to an end with the death on the Cross: a new, an absolutely primary
beginning to a Buddhistic peace movement, to an actual and not merely promised happiness
on earth . . . On the heel of [these] glad tidings came the worst of all: those of Paul. In Paul
was embodied the antithetical type to the bringer of glad tidings, the genius of hatred, of
the vision of hatred, of the inexorable logic of hatred. What did this dysangelist not sacrifice
to his hatred! The redeemer above all: he nailed him to his Cross. The life, the example, the
teaching, the death, the meaning and the right of the entire Gospel nothing was left once
this hate-obsessed false-coiner had grasped what alone he could make use of. Not the reality,
not the historical truth! . . . His requirement was power . . . 26

Although the will to power undoubtedly burns brightly in Nietzsches Paul, it is

important to see that the form that this will takes is one of ressentiment, and in this sense
Pauls nihilism is of a reactive, if not strictly passive, kind. This ressentiment is diag-
nosed by Nietzsche in the Anti-Christ as a symptom both of personal weakness Paul
is made angry and revengeful at his impotence before the law and also national or
political weakness Paul is a member of a Jewish nation defined by its historical expe-
rience of exile and, in Pauls day, by its subordination to the mighty Roman Empire:

This was his vision on the road to Damascus: he grasped that to disvalue the world he
needed the belief in immortality, that the concept Hell will master even Rome that with
the Beyond one kills life . . . Nihilist and Christian: they rhyme [in German], and do not
merely rhyme . . . 27

The active Paul

Jacob Taubes was a philosopher of religion whose Political Theology of Paul (taken from a
series of lectures given in 1987, just before his death) was a significant spur to the recent
Paul revival in philosophy. Taubes admitted that Nietzsche was his greatest teacher on
Paul.28 Yet for Taubes, Paul is not the reactive nihilist that Nietzsche describes, but an
active, even revolutionary, opponent of imperial power: [M]y thesis is that . . . the Epistle
to the Romans is a political theology, a political declaration of war on the Caesar.29 The
distinctly political ambition of this Paul is not a matter of seeking personal, priestly power
by devaluing the values of the Roman world, as in Nietzsche, but rather to found and legit-
imate a new people of God.30 Taubes Paul is an active, eschatological nihilist.
Taubes believed that Nietzsche was really on to something in identifying Pauls nihi-
lism towards this world, and specifically towards the Roman Empire.31 This world
decays, is passing away, and so world politics, contra the timeless order of empire, is
nihilism. This equation of world politics with nihilism is Walter Benjamins, from the
last line of his Theological-Political Fragment, but Taubes sees an astonishing paral-
lel between Benjamins text and chapters 8 and 13 of Pauls Epistle to the Romans.32
Benjamin writes:

For nature is Messianic by reason of its eternal and total passing away.
To strive after such passing, even for those stages of man that are nature, is the task of world
politics, whose method must be called nihilism.33

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Baker 7

Taubes finds evidence for his thesis that Pauls Epistle to the Romans is nothing less
than a political declaration of war on Rome from the letters opening salutation. Taubes
seizes here on Pauls announcement of his calling, which asserts that he, Paul, is called
to proclaim the gospel of God since this gospel concerns Gods son, who was descended
from David according to the flesh (Romans 1: 13). Taubes asks: Why this emphasis on
Jesus as the son of David? This is not repeated anywhere else in Pauls letters. It is as the
son of David that Jesus is elected to rule, which is a natural quality, but Son of God is
rather ascribed, as in Psalm 2, the psalm of coronation. Taubes concludes:

This is an act of enthronement. So we are dealing with a conscious emphasis of those attri-
butes that are imperatorial, kingly, imperial. They are stressed before the congregation in
Rome, where the imperator is himself present, and where the center of the cult of the
emperor, the emperor religion, is located.34

Taubes returns three times to this theme over the course of his lectures, stressing that
Pauls Epistle to the Romans needs to be understood as a political declaration of war
and as carrying a political charge which is explosive to the highest degree.35 When a
letter is introduced in these terms, here and nowhere else, and to be read aloud to the
congregation too, a challenge is being laid down. This is a piece of anti-Caesarism that
is being made eminently public, and the Romans have censors who are not idiots.
Taubes then moves from philological reflections to a much broader thesis that the
central function of law in the Epistle to the Romans (recalling that, in this letter, Paul
seeks to describe law as somehow deactivated or rendered inoperative in Christ) is itself
a piece of political theology, since the concept of law is being used by Paul as a compro-
mise formula for the Imperium Romanum.36 In a memorable phrase, Taubes describes
Pauls period of late antiquity as suffused with an aura of an apotheosis of nomos.37
This Hellenistic nomos aura could take a Greek, Roman, or Jewish form, but, while
everybody understood law in their own way, everybody participated equally in general-
ized nomos theology.38 Taubes believes that Paul himself reflects this aura, such that
law for Paul is not simply the Torah, nor the law of the universe, nor natural law, but
all of these in one.39 But while Pauls sense of law echoes his context, his treatment of
law is anything but contemporary. For Taubes, Paul clambers out of the nomos consen-
sus of his day and in this sense is a fanatic, a zealot whose protest against law proposes
an incredible transvaluation of values:

It isnt nomos but rather the one who was nailed to a cross by nomos who is the imperator!
This is incredible, and compared to this all the little revolutionaries are nothing. This trans-
valuation turns Jewish-Roman-Hellenistic upper-class theology on its head, the whole mis-
hmash of Hellenism. Sure, Paul is also universal, but by virtue of the eye of the needle of
the crucified one, which means: transvaluation of all the values of this world. This is nothing
like nomos as summum bonum.40

Taubes Paul, like Nietzsches, is a nihilist. But where Nietzsches Paul is reactively bent
on exploiting existing resentment at Rome for his own, destructive, purposes, Taubes
Paul actively creates opposition to the Roman Empire almost out of nothing. And he does

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8 Philosophy and Social Criticism

so for that most constructive of political motives to found a new people. That this peo-
ple, occupying a demonic world structure that is passing away (I Corinthians 7:29),
should in no way seek a revolutionary confrontation with its equally transitory imperial
superstructure, does not make Pauls intentions, or his methods, any less radical.41 To the
contrary, they indicate just how nihilistic Paul really is with regard to this world.42 Nei-
ther Taubes Paul, nor Taubes himself, see anything in history other than crisis. Histor-
ical time is distress, and therefore Benjamin is right in seeing politics, whose method
must be called nihilism, as capable only of destroying the old order.43 For a Paul capable
of traversing such destruction, giving values necessary for the creation of a new order,
we must turn to Badiou.

Paul the overman

He who demanded Dionysian affirmation, him who, like Paul, believed himself to be break-
ing the history of the world in two, and to be everywhere substituting lifes yes for nihi-
lisms no, would have found better inspiration by citing this passage: For the Son of God,
Jesus Christ, whom we preached among you . . . was not Yes and No; but in him it is always
Yes. (II Corinthians 1:19)44

For Badiou, nothing in Nietzsches attack on Paul fits its target. Paul does not detest
Rome, being on the contrary proud of his Roman citizenship.45 Neither does he condemn
this life, since the world that is crucified with Pauls Jesus is nothing other than the
Greek cosmos as a totality that puts everyone in his place.46 He does not even mention
hell.47 Nietzsches hate-filled nihilist who preaches eternal life hereafter as a curse on
this life is more accurately described as completely uninterested in immortality, empha-
sizing rather the trinity of affirmation, life and the new man (the overman?) over nega-
tion, death and the old man.48 Where Nietzsche criticizes Paul for the falsification of the
gospel accounts of Jesus, saying that Paul wants only Christs death and something in
addition, Badiou points out that this something, the resurrection, is in fact Pauls entire
focus.49 It is Nietzsche who is falsifying Paul, argues Badiou, since in shifting attention
from the life of Christ to his death and resurrection, Paul is not nihilistically moving the
centre of gravity from this life to the nothingness of the beyond, as Nietzsche claims, but
rather is teaching a principle of overexistence on the basis of which life, affirmative life,
was restored and refounded for all.50 Badious Paul thus shifts the centre of gravity in an
opposite direction to Nietzsches, from death to life from life in the flesh, which per-
ishes and dies, to life in the spirit, which takes revenge on death by enabling us to live
affirmatively here and now; and from life under the law, which kills, to a life of grace,
which knows nothing of death.51 Against Nietzsches judgement that Paul would seek to
kill life, Badiou has a simple rejoinder from Pauls first Epistle to the Corinthians
(15:55): O death, where is thy victory?52
Badiou thinks that Nietzsche should in fact have seen Paul as his ally, rather than his
opponent, in the overcoming of contemporary nihilist decadence.53 For if Nietzsche
were to have been successful in such an overcoming, he would have had to echo (which

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Baker 9

he in fact did), rather than to oppose, the three themes of which Paul is the inventor,
namely:

. . . that of the self-legitimating subjective declaration (the character of Zarathustra), the

breaking of History in two (grand politics), and the new man as the end of guilty slavery
and affirmation of life (the Overman)? If Nietzsche is so violent toward Paul, it is because
he is his rival far more than his opponent.54

For Badiou, we can understand Nietzsches hatred of Paul only if we see how much
Nietzsche loathes universalism.55 Indeed, Paul is where the bug gets into aristocratic his-
tory for Nietzsche, such that nobility is transferred into weakness, with all the democratic
levelling that results.56 For Badiou, too, Paul is undoubtedly the one who devalues
ancient hierarchy, though Pauls responsibility for this is even more direct in Badious
account than it is in Nietzsches Paul is, quite literally, the inventor of universalism
in the sense that, until Paul, the thought of the universal remains only implicit. If Paul is
indeed the founder of universalism, then this act of foundation gives us a better, or at
least a more psychologically pertinent, explanation for Nietzsches hatred of Paul than
Badious second argument (which focuses on Pauls universalism). In accordance with
Badious first argument, it could more plausibly be claimed that Nietzsche is simply jea-
lous of Pauls status as the overman of antiquity who succeeds not only in devaluing the
values of the ancient world (which, as nihilism, is all that Nietzsche will allow him) but
also in positing new values (which, in his jealousy of such overcoming, Nietzsche is not
able to admit).
In one sense, Badious Paul is simply Nietzsches, with the difference that Badiou
pronounces Pauls breaking of history in two, namely his devaluation of the highest val-
ues of antiquity, to be a positive, rather than a catastrophic, event. Badiou celebrates
what he sees as Pauls novel exclusion of communalism, of the national gods, the pass-
ing of which Nietzsche rather laments. Badiou sees this break as possible because, at the
level of thought, Paul understands that the event (which for Paul, though not for Badiou,
is the resurrection) is that which, being indifferently for all, breaks with the conjoined
themes of law and cosmos, with the assigning of places and the order of things respec-
tively. Badious Paul, in short, enacts a rupture with ancient particularisms in the name of
a singular universal. This Paul is the first to see that the universal has the structure of an
absolutely unique event which finds no differences in the all it addresses, and that gen-
uine universalism therefore cannot be the universalization of any particularity, which is
ultimately what the One of cosmopolitanism (of the Pax Romana in Pauls case and
global capital in ours) consists of.
Throughout Badious account, we get a strong sense of Paul as a creative (rather than
cunning) genius. Thus we read that, contra identitarian communalism, Paul is, strictly
speaking, the inventor of a subject devoid of all identity;57 that, to those who know
the rules of the ancient world, Pauls statement to the Galatians (3:28) that there is nei-
ther Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, is genuinely stupefying;58 and that,
in deploying the underlying structure of Pauls thought, which is its universalism, we
should give credit to him who, deciding that none was free from what a truth demands
and disjoining the true from the Law, provoked entirely alone a cultural revolution

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10 Philosophy and Social Criticism

upon which we still depend.59 As Badiou himself hints on a couple of occasions, should
we not see Paul as an overman? Yet if we adopt this perspective, then although we
release Paul from Nietzsches charge of passive, reactive nihilism, we continue to tie
Paul to the problem of nihilism itself. And this is something that Badious reading lends
itself to, given that, for Badiou, it is true, first, that nihilism is the figure both of Pauls
age and of our own, and, second, that Paul, who overcomes the nihilism of his own age,
is our contemporary.60 Though the nihilism of the Roman Empire is different from our
capitalist-parliamentarian nihilism, it shares the same form of de-politicization;61 and
though Pauls passage through nihilism (the resurrection) cannot be our passage, its form
(the truth of the event, addressed universally) remains the only way to confront nihilism
in our own time:62

Every age . . . has its own figure of nihilism. The name changes, but always under these
names . . . we find . . . an obscure desire for catastrophe. It is only by . . . affirming truths
against the desire for nothingness, that we tear ourselves away from nihilism.63

Yet if Paul is our model in the creative overcoming of nihilism, it is important to be pre-
cise that this is not in the Dionysian sense of Nietzsches destructioncreation. Badiou
concedes that terroristic nihilism of the destructivecreative kind has a creative, rather
than a consenting, relation to the nothing, and is thereby preferable to the passive nihi-
lism that abounds today, where the best that can be hoped for is the avoidance of evil.64
As Badiou points out, this contemporary humanitarian nihilism, in ideologically refus-
ing any contact with the nothing, collapses even deeper into it. In other words, having
suppressed the terrorism of active nihilism, we do not escape nihilism itself, since
we have only substituted its reactive for its active form.65 But in more recent works,
starting with Being and Event, Badiou has offered a self-criticism of his earlier emphasis
(for example, in Theory of the Subject) on destruction, which he now identifies as too
close to a blind imperative to purify.66 In place of the terroristic charms of destruc-
tioncreation, Badiou now proffers subtractioncreation, where subtraction thinks the
nothing or negativity as a gap rather than as primordial identity. This shift in emphasis,
Badiou suggests, avoids the pitfall of the search for authenticity (exemplified in the case
of Heidegger), which loses itself in the destructive quest for the origin (Being). Although
many things do indeed deserve to be destroyed, this passion for destruction can never be
fulfilled since purification is fated to remain incomplete.67 Subtraction, by contrast, is
committed to the construction of a minimal difference from the nothing, which is what
a truth procedure does by providing its own axiomatic.68 While destructioncreation can
never actually begin creating (since the destructive project of purification will always
recede over the horizon), subtractioncreation knows it must invent content and is there-
fore the only true passion for the new. The new man is produced rather than restored in
his Heideggerian authenticity.69
The difference between destruction and subtraction notwithstanding, Badiou contin-
ues to tie Paul to the question of nihilism as Nietzsche understood it by making him
the first prophet of the possibility of new worlds (truth procedures that, in pronouncing
the event, break with the order of things). It is rather in Agamben that we find the most
sustained attempt to write a non-nihilistic Paul, though it will be interesting to see that

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Baker 11

Badious passion for the minimal difference, which is his own attempt to exit the cycle
of destructioncreation, is close to the messianic vocation that Agamben finds invalu-
able in Paul.70

Beyond nihilism? Paul and the messianic vocation

It is no omission that leads Agamben to make only passing reference to Nietzsche in his
book on Paul. Agambens Paul, precisely because he is a thinker of the messianic, cannot
be grasped through the categories of Nietzsches nihilism he is neither the giver of new
values, nor the one who tears down the old values, but rather the one who announces the
possibility of using existing vocations (callings).71 The messianic vocation, which is the
deactivation of law, is thus neither a militant revolutionism with regard to this world,
nor a nihilistic iconoclasm, but a profaning of worldly identities which enables them to
be operationalized without in any way transcending them in some beyond. This world
remains in place, but is no longer experienced as it was before. The before is therefore
not temporal in the sense of the experience of chronological time, but rather an existen-
tial experience of closure, to be replaced in the after of messianic time by the negation
(the Pauline hos me, as not) which enables these same worldly vocations to be experi-
enced as open by those who live in the Messiah.
The small but all-important difference between negation as the as not and as the as
if is the difference between messianism as already realized eschatology and as merely a
point of view on another possible world. The as if that reduces redemption to a point of
view is, in Agambens view, characteristic of Adornos negative dialectics, which
Agamben sees as an absolutely non-messianic form of thought.72 The messianic voca-
tion, as far as Agamben is concerned, does not give us a viewpoint on another, redeemed,
world.73 The as not is not an ideal in the way that the as if is, and is indeed the latters
abolition, in the sense of its realization.74 Crucially, the as if (presumably inasmuch as
it assumes the uselessness of existing vocations) is also an outcome of every nihilism, a
point that draws Agamben into one of his few references in his Paul text to Nietzsche,
this time in agreement with him.75 The messianic subject, on the other hand,

. . . no longer knows the as if . . . He knows that in messianic time the saved world coin-
cides with the world that is irretrievably lost, and that, to use Bonhoeffers words, he must
now really live in a world without God. This means that he must not disguise this worlds
being-without-God in any way. The saving God is the God who abandons him, and the fact
of representations (the fact of the as if) cannot pretend to save the appearance of salvation.
The messianic subject does not contemplate the world as if it were saved. In Benjamins
words, he contemplates salvation only to the extent that he loses himself in what cannot
be saved; this is how difficult it is to dwell in the calling.76

The tensions with Nietzsches thought of the death of God here are striking. In Agam-
bens version, the realization that this world is all there is tempts us nihilistically to opt
for the as if where we should rather attempt messianically to maintain ourselves in the
as not. The as not is itself clearly a form of negation of the world, but it is not a nihi-
listic one in the sense that it neither seeks, nor even contemplates, some beyond. On

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12 Philosophy and Social Criticism

this radicalized reading, even if one refrains from positing another world, but rather, as
with Nietzsches artist, creates new forms, one is still caught up in nihilism.77 Messianic
life, in stark contrast to Nietzsches artistic life, is assimilation to the world even to the
extent of involving those it has called in becoming like the scum of the world, the refuse
of all things (I Corinthians 4:13).78 Nietzsche too, of course, sought the utmost affirma-
tion of everything that has been with his abyssal thought of eternal recurrence, his amor
fati. Yet Agambens messianic vocation (with strong echoes of Deleuzes reading of
Nietzsches eternal return as the return of difference, of that which differs from itself)
does not want the return of the same.79 Rather, redemption, though it is firmly of this
world, is this world rendered graspable and therefore used ever anew. The hos me is what
offers up this world for use.
For Agamben, this as not is therefore the fundamental messianic term in Paul.80 The
hos me is not a matter of eschatological indifference (the world is ending; what does it
matter!), nor does it have any specific content.81 We remain as we were when we were
called (I Corinthians 7:20). The nullification wrought by the hos me therefore attaches
itself to that which is, it does not tend towards an elsewhere.82 But since neither does
it induce a fatalistic indifference towards that which it nullifies, what exactly does it do?
Agamben here highlights Pauls conclusion to his passage on the hos me, which declares
that the present form of this world is passing away (ibid.: 7:31). In accordance with this
passage, which Agamben translates somewhat differently as passing away is the figure,
the way of being, of this world, the hos me itself is what makes the figure of this world
pass by preparing its end.83 This is not another figure or another world: it is the passing
of the figure of this world.84 The hos me is negation, not dialectics, where the latter, in
sublating that which is negated in a universal and teleological process, tends towards
the elsewhere, the other world.85 Politically, this means revealing the fundamental con-
tingency, the arbitrariness, of each and every social condition or identity.86 Given that
it is law that apportions these identities, this revelation is at once an unveiling of under-
lying lawlessness and of the powers that hide this lawlessness.87 Unveiling is what
the messianic vocation does: bringing to light the inoperativity of the law and the
substantial illegitimacy of each and every power in messianic time.88 In the precise
sense of anarchy as an-arche, that which is without origin, the messianic vocation is
anarchistic showing the absence of foundation beneath all profane power without
in any way offering the foundation for a new, redeemed power.89
Agamben finds further support for his thesis that the messianic vocation negates this
world without positing a world to come (or, more precisely, that the world to come is
already here) in the Pauline notion of messianic time. Agamben argues that messianic
time is neither this eon (world) nor the coming eon; neither chronological time nor the
apocalyptic time of the eschaton (the end of time).90 Messianic time is rather an opera-
tional time, the time that time takes to come to an end.91 It is seized kairos [occasion or
opportune moment], which is itself nothing other than seized chronos [sequential time],
and this is its relation to the as not, which, as revocation, as deactivation, is nonetheless
active, a vocation.92 This operational time is not to be added as a supplement to chron-
ological time (as, for example, in Marxism, which, following Hegel, views redemption
as the final result of a historical process), which is why Pauls parousia [presence] should
not be understood as second coming but rather as the relation of the Messiah to each

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Baker 13

instant of chronological time.93 This relation is one of recapitulation, as in the Epistle to

the Ephesians 1:10, where Paul writes that all things are recapitulated in him, things in
heaven and things on earth.94 In this sense, suggests Agamben, the messianic is wrongly
described as future-orientated, since it rather involves memory, a thoroughly unnostalgic
remembering which allows what was accomplished in the past to be unaccomplished
and, conversely, what is unfulfilled in the present to be fulfilled.95 Pauls messianic
vocation is thus an immanent rather than an imminent transcendence, or, in Agambens
own words, a zone of indiscernability between immanence and transcendence, between
this world and the future world.96 While this world is negated, it is brought thereby to
fulfilment. There is no place for nihilism here in any of its Nietzschean moments: this
world is neither a source of ressentiment, nor a target for destruction, nor an opportunity
for overcoming.97

The Gnostic Paul

While I find Agambens account of Pauline messianism compelling precisely for its
break with the categories of nihilism, in this section I will argue that, genealogically,
such a strong exclusion of nihilism from Pauls thought, and indeed from Agambens
too, is not possible. I will suggest that Agamben is able to portray Paul as non-
nihilistic only by downplaying the Gnostic aspects of Pauls thought and that, moreover,
Gnostic apophasis the negative theology that first makes worldly negation possible is
part of the genealogy of Agambens own messianic vocation, which also turns on the
power of negation.
In their fully developed forms in late antiquity, the various Gnosticisms identified
the saving god with the alien god of light who comes from without this world, in some
accounts from the eighth heaven. The power of this heaven, called Ogdoas (the num-
ber 8), is above and beyond the reach of the other seven heavens comprising the cos-
mological schema of the Hellenistic world.98 The reverse side of this identification of
divine light with the beyond was a tendency towards a Manichean condemnation of the
material world and its creator god, the demiurge. Agamben downplays the Gnostic
Paul (Gnosis is not mentioned once in his study) because he seeks to emphasize the
messianic in Paul, a non-nihilistic Paul for whom the elsewhere is a distraction and
who thus refrains from condemning this world, reserving his judgement only for its
powers and principalities.99
Yet it is this very Paul, it is worth recalling, who states that demonic powers are the
rulers of this world (Ephesians 6:12), not only of the powers and principalities in it.
Thus Marcion, whose early Christian heresy was precisely an extreme form of the Gnos-
tic judgement of this world as demonic, selected only Pauline epistles and the gospel of
Luke for his Christian canon.100 For Marcion, the creator God of the Old Testament, as
demiurge, is an entirely different God from the Father of Jesus Christ, who is the redemp-
tive alien God.101 Marcion believed Paul to be the only authentic apostle and himself to
be the true disciple of Paul.102 In Taubes view, it is indisputable that the Gnostic ten-
dency in Christianity begins with Paul; it is not without reason that the Valentinians
argued that their fundamental concepts were to be found in him.103 Even if he himself
resisted the Gnostic valorization of sophia [wisdom] in his dispute with the Corinthians,

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14 Philosophy and Social Criticism

Paul is nonetheless a pneumaticist who draws a strong distinction between the flesh and
the spirit and who attaches no salvific significance to the earthly life of Jesus.104 This
view of a strongly Gnostic tendency in Paul is shared by Badiou, who describes Marcion-
ism as ultra-Pauline: By pushing [Paul] a little, one could arrive at Marcions concep-
tion: the gospel is an absolute beginning.105 Another influential study of Paul, this time
from Daniel Boyarin, also agrees that Paul is a moderate Gnostic, somewhere
between the monadic corporeality of the Jerusalem church and the extreme spirituality
of the later true Gnostics, who posited a radical dualism of soul and body.106 In sum,
there are good reasons to suppose that, inasmuch as it is present in the Christian tradition,
the Gnostic condemnation of this world enters Christianity primarily through Paul, and
in this sense Nietzsches reading of Paul is correct.107
Agamben has himself commented negatively on the Gnostic legacy in modern pol-
itics.108 For Agamben, the need to overcome the Gnostic heresy was the principal driver
of the Trinitarian paradigm. But despite its attempt to heal the rift in Gnosis between the
God who is foreign to the world and the God who governs it, Trinitarianism remained
within an economical articulation (a division of labour) of Father and Son that did not
fully break with Gnostic dualism. As a result, argues Agamben, orthodox Christianity
has not left behind the fundamental extraneousness of the world in Gnosticism.109
Given that Agambens genealogy of modern governmentality runs back to the Trinitar-
ian economy (the opposition between Father and Son in Trinitarianism gives us that
between kingdom and government in todays governmentalized societies), this has con-
temporary consequences.110 These can be seen in cases as varied as US foreign policy,
which seeks to govern whole swathes of the world while remaining extraneous to them,
and in the phenomenon of the tourist, who is the planetary figure of this irreducible
extraneousness with regard to the world.111
Agamben draws too strong a contrast between Pauls messianic vocation and Gnos-
ticism. In his later writings, Taubes makes clear that the Gnosticism of late antiquity is
not far from the purely this-worldly negation celebrated by Agamben as the properly
messianic vocation. For Taubes, Gnostic dualism is not eschatological at all, since
Gnosticism in the first few centuries of the Christian era is precisely what emerges
when apocalypticism fails, as indeed apocalypticism had earlier been a response to the
failure of prophecy.112 Just as Jewish apocalypticism responded to disappointment at
prophetic pronouncements of the coming of a new kingdom by anticipating the end of
the kingdoms of this world, so also Gnosticism emerged to cope with the refusal of
this world to end given the delay of parousia which confronted the early Church.
Gnosticism after Paul therefore transcended the nihilistic intent of apocalypticism,
transposing the beyond from an imminent future in time to the voyage of the soul out
of time. The drama of salvation was decisively displaced from the stage of history to
that of the human soul; from external-political to internal-spiritual liberation.113 In this
sense, Gnosticism for Taubes, as a revolution in consciousness that exceeds the
boundaries of ancient experience, is both deeply historical and irreducible to its his-
torical manifestations in that it consists in something like the perennial power of
negation of worldly powers that Agamben identifies with the messianic vocation: The
transworldly god, degraded to demiurge, vacated the scene for the anti-worldly
God:114

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Baker 15

The Gnostic divine predicates: unrecognizable, unnameable, unsayable, boundless, non-

being, are negative predicates They are to be understood as a negation of the world.115

That this anti-worldly God of Gnostic negative theology is, as far as this world is con-
cerned, strictly nothing, means that Gnostic transcendence cancels itself, finding instead
its correlate in the pnuma, the self of man.116 This inner-human transcendence estab-
lishes both a new idea of freedom and a new man for whom law and worldly wisdom are
not binding.117 What appears as the beyond in Gnosticism is thus neither a beyond in
linear time, nor a beyond in heaven, but rather a beyond in man himself which is
really the depth, as the Gnostic Valentinus called it, or ground, of being.118 That this
being is nothing reminds us that Gnostic apophasis is part of the genealogy of Heideg-
gers project, and from here finds its way to Agamben (given the formers significance to
the latter).119 Agambens messianic vocation (negation), which he finds in Paul, is also
in the Gnosticism that he excludes in Paul.
Indeed, a reading of Taubes earlier work suggests that Agambens Pauline messian-
ism is genealogically linked to Gnosticism in a more primordial way still. Agamben is
right that Pauls eschatology should not be reduced to apocalypticism Paul is not a thin-
ker of the apocalyptic end of time but rather of the messianic end times (the eschaton) as
the time of the now.120 But, in his Occidental Eschatology, Taubes shows that it is apoc-
alypse that inaugurates eschatology itself, whether Gnostic or messianic in intent.121
The God of ancient Jewish apocalypticism, in challenging the world, makes it begin
to end while also promising new things.122 Without this temporalization of cosmos there
can be no eschatology because ancient cosmology, as Nietzsche saw, knows only eternal
return there is not yet any history, only the circle of life.
The messianic opening-up of this world in Paul is linked to the eschatological possi-
bility of this worlds being not all. Agamben would no doubt concur with this, arguing
that potentiality is never exhausted in the act that the world as it is can always, and
infinitely, be other (such that Paul can messianically see the form of this world as passing
away rather than nihilistically seeking the form of this world to pass). Taubes, however,
has demonstrated that, genealogically, the new messianic order is inextricable from the
apocalypse of the old.123

Conclusion: The power of the eighth heaven

Agambens construction of Pauls messianic vocation as transcendence in immanence,
as a new relation to this world, nicely separates Pauline messianism from nihilism. Yet
I have argued that such a separation, while heuristically helpful, is not genealogically
defensible. While Agamben is right that Pauls eschatology is not apocalyptic (nihilistic)
in intent, Taubes shows that it is apocalypticism that first enables eschatology itself.
Nihilism, it seems, is irreducible to the messianism even of Agambens non-nihilistic
Paul.
I have also argued that Agambens attempt to read Pauls messianism as tending,
non-nihilistically, towards the here-and-now does not require the radical exclusion
of Gnosticism in Paul. The Gnosticisms of late antiquity, which of course was also
Pauls epoch (even if these Gnosticisms developed mostly after Paul as the parousia

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16 Philosophy and Social Criticism

he anticipated failed to arrive), seem in fact to have been primarily a force for negation
in Agambens sense of the term that is, rather than tending towards the elsewhere, for
their adherents they worked to de-legitimate this-worldly powers. Rather than positive
knowledge of the beyond, which is strictly impossible for apophatic theology, what
the Gnostic knew related her differently to this world: she knew that it is governed by a
lesser divine being (demiurge) who gives the law and judges those who break it as lord;
she knew also that this claim to power (along with all those built on it) is illegitimate,
based as it is on the creator gods ignorance of his lower-order status.124 Coming to
gnosis was thus the revelation that the candidate had been released from the demiurges
power, as stated in the redemption ritual, a declaration of independence addressed to
the demiurge himself:

I am a son from the Father the Father who is preexistent . . . I derive from Him who is
preexistent, and I come again to my own place whence I came forth.125

The threat that this posed to any constituted authority whatsoever was understandably
not lost on Church Fathers such as Irenaeus, for whom the Gnostics maintain they have
attained to a height above all power.126 The transformation of the Gnostic initiates rela-
tionship to the demiurge simultaneously transformed his relationship to all earthly
authorities, including bishops of the orthodox Church.
The veracity of this account of the Gnosticism of late antiquity, as popularized
by Elaine Pagels, is a matter for ongoing debate. This is not Taubes problem, how-
ever, since his Gnosticism is not reducible to any of its historical moments but
rather signals a generic form of inward-directed negation of the world that avoids
the abyss of violence threatened by externally directed apocalypticism. Yet despite
being alert to the dangers of apocalypticism, Taubes, echoing Nietzsche on active
nihilism, does not exclude it, contesting that it was apocalypse that broke the hold
of ancient cosmos by making it begin to end, and that this termination of cosmos
was at once the beginning of the end of law, as first principle of cosmos, too.127
The antinomianism that devalues the powers and principalities is first an idea of
the destruction of cosmos; pure nihilism. Taubes does not erase nihilism from Paul
as Agamben does because, in his view, the antinomian Paul is also and necessarily
an anti-cosmic Paul.
Agambens messianic vocation, as deactivation of law and thus also of each and every
worldly power, therefore shares with Taubes Gnosticism the space opened up by apoc-
alypticsm. Messianism and Gnosticism should not be treated as if a gulf separates them
but rather be seen as kindred spirits in the art of negation. If Gnosticism is more explicitly
nihilistic than Pauline messianism, and I think Agamben is right that this difference of
emphasis is important (whether or not it can be found in Paul is another question), then
this is perhaps because Gnosis first devalues the world (through revealing the true nature
of the demiurge who created it) while worldly powers are devalued by default. Agam-
bens Pauline messianism, by contrast, devalues worldly powers while refusing negation
of this world in toto. This distinction makes all the difference if we are trying to avoid
nihilism, but both Gnosticism and messianism can negate only thanks to the annihilating
thought of the coming apocalypse.

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Baker 17

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and publication of this
article.

Notes
1. There are many other instructive readings of Paul that cannot be engaged here from thinkers as
diverse as Martin Heidegger, Stanislas Breton, Jean-Francois Lyotard and Slavoj Zizek, to
name just a few.
2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ (Harmondsworth, Mx: Penguin
Classics, 1968), pp. 180, 14.
3. Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2004), pp. 245; Alain Badiou, St Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Stanford, CA: Stan-
ford University Press, 2003), pp. 1923. According to Ward Blanton, Dispossessed Life:
Introduction to Bretons Paul, in Stanislas Breton, A Radical Philosophy of St Paul (New
York: Colombia University Press, 2011), pp. ixxxii (p. xi), this Lutheran tradition of under-
standing Paul as the universalizer of Jewish particularism is characteristic also of Stanislas
Bretons influential reading of Paul in A Radical Philosophy of St Paul.
4. Taubes, Political Theology of Paul, p. 23.
5. Badiou, St Paul, p. 87.
6. ibid.: 77.
7. ibid.: 108; Taubes, Political Theology of Paul, p. 80.
8. See, for example, Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return: or, Cosmos and History
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971).
9. Badiou, St Paul, p. 108.
10. Jacob Taubes, From Cult to Culture: Fragments Towards a Critique of Historical Reason
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), p. 77. Taubes repeats this point in Political
Theology of Paul (p. 10): the cross is a total and monstrous inversion of the values of Roman
and Jewish thought.
11. Alain Badiou, The Adventure of French Philosophy (New York: Verso, 2012), pp. 556.
12. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006), p. 7.
13. Friedrich Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003).
14. ibid.: 146.
15. ibid.: 147.
16. ibid.: 146.
17. ibid.: 1467.
18. ibid.: 146.
19. ibid.: 141. In notebook 7, from Spring 1887, Nietzsche even considers giving ontological pri-
macy to this active nihilism:

Every drive that wants to be satisfied expresses its dissatisfaction with the present state
of things what? Might the whole be composed entirely of dissatisfied parts, all of
which have their heads full of whats desirable? Might the course of things be pre-
cisely the Away from here! Away from reality!, be eternal discontent itself? Might

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18 Philosophy and Social Criticism

desirability itself be the driving force? Might it be deus? (Nietsche, Writings from the
Late Notebooks: 140)

20. Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

21. ibid.: 412.
22. Nietzsche, Late Notebooks, p. 204.
23. Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, p. 147.
24. ibid.: 166.
25. ibid.: 173.
26. ibid.: 1667.
27. ibid.: 194.
28. Taubes, Political Theology of Paul, p. 79.
29. ibid.: 16.
30. ibid.: 28.
31. ibid.: 72.
32. ibid.
33. Walter Benjamin, Theological-Political Fragment, in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Auto-
biographical Writing, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), pp. 31214
(p. 313).
34. Taubes, Political Theology of Paul, p. 14.
35. ibid.: 16, 24 and see also 73.
36. ibid.: 23.
37. ibid.
38. ibid.
39. ibid.: 24.
40. ibid.
41. ibid.: 54.
42. Joshua Robert Gold, Jacob Taubes: Apocalypse from Below, Telos 134 (Spring 2006):
14056 (155).
43. Taubes, Cult to Culture, p. 110; Gold, Jacob Taubes: 1456; Benjamin, Theological-
Political Fragment, p. 313.
44. Badiou, St Paul, p. 71.
45. ibid.
46. ibid.
47. ibid.: 71, 96.
48. ibid.: 71.
49. ibid.: 61.
50. ibid.; emphasis added.
51. ibid.: 45, 62, 73; ch. 7.
52. ibid.: 71.
53. ibid.: 61.
54. ibid.
55. ibid.: 62.
56. Taubes, Political Theology of Paul, p. 78.
57. Badiou, St Paul, p. 5; emphasis added.

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Baker 19

58. ibid.: 9.
59. ibid.; 15; emphasis added.
60. ibid.: 7. See also Badiou, French Philosophy, pp. 556.
61. Badiou, St Paul, p. 7.
62. Thus, elsewhere, Badiou (French Philosophy, p. 60) outlines one of his maxims for anti-
nihilism as: Exalt exceptions.
63. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (New York: Verso, 2001), pp.
389.
64. Alain Badiou, The Century (Oxford: Polity, 2007), pp. 645.
65. ibid.
66. ibid.: 547.
67. ibid.: 56.
68. ibid.
69. ibid.: 65. Thus the new man is free from all predicates such as family, property and nation:
Marx had already understood that the universal singularity of the proletariat derives from its
bearing no predicate, possessing nothing, and in particular not having, in the strong sense of
the term, any fatherland (ibid.: 66).
70. There is not space to explore it fully here, but Badious minimal difference (or creative rela-
tion to the nothing) nonetheless continues to differ from Agambens messianic vocation,
which, as we shall see, turns on the (non-dialectical) power of negation of extant worldly voca-
tions. For Badiou, on the contrary, a creative excess can[not] be produced by negating ordi-
nary life. No, there must already be an excess in place . . . There is no alchemy that could
change the sign of ordinary states in the absence of the passage called rebellion. Rebellion
here, then, means that within the extremity experienced in negative excess abides the cer-
tainty that we can change its sign (Badiou, The Century, pp. 1423). In contrast, Agambens
version of changing signs, which he calls recapitulation, does not find this messianic excess
as something separate from everyday life.
71. Agamben no doubt follows Heidegger in eschewing discussion of values when speaking of
nihilism. Conceiving of our fundamental concerns as values is nihilism, for Heidegger, who
comes to see Nietzsches emphasis on will (the positing of values) as not the solution to, but
indeed the culmination of, European nihilism. Values, considered as objects independent from
us that we chose/posit, can equally well be rejected/unposited. No one dies for mere external
values, but only for shared commitments by which he or she is always already gripped. See
Hubert Dreyfus, Heidegger on the Connection between Nihilism, Art, Technology and Pol-
itics, in Charles Guignon (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1993), pp. 34572.
72. Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 38.
73. ibid.: 41.
74. ibid.: 42.
75. ibid.; 37.
76. ibid.: 42.
77. ibid.: 37.
78. ibid.: 41. This section of Agambens discussion is no doubt indebted to Heideggers reading
of Paul, a reading which Agamben engages briefly. Agamben seeks to open up some space

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20 Philosophy and Social Criticism

between himself and Heidegger by recalling that Heideggers version of assimilation to the
world involves, in its authentic mode, the appropriation of the improper. Agamben appar-
ently sees this terminology as too caught up with traditional notions of subjectivity, and
therefore prefers the term use to appropriation, since the messianic subject (being noth-
ing other than the as not of existing subjectivities) is itself nullified, and so cannot seize
either profane identities or even itself. What the messianic subject can seize is not itself
as some selfsame identity, but a certain time. See Martin Heidegger, The Phenomenology
of Religious Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); Agamben, Time that
Remains, pp. 334.
79. In Remnants of Auschwitz: the Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 1999),
p. 100, Agamben argues that, after Auschwitz, wishing for everything to return eternally
is no longer conceivable. How could anyone love Auschwitz as destiny?
80. Agamben, Time that Remains, p. 23. See also Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory:
For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univer-
sity Press, 2011), pp. 2489.
81. Agamben, Time that Remains, p. 23.
82. ibid.: 24.
83. ibid.
84. ibid.: 245.
85. Badiou agrees that, contra the Hegelian appropriation of Christianity, the Pauline message is
non-dialectical, though for Badiou it is not dependent on negation either. The event (which is
the resurrection in Paul) is affirmation without preliminary negation; it is what comes upon us
in caesura of the law. It is pure and simple encounter (Badiou, St Paul, pp. 6574).
86. Agamben, Time that Remains, pp. 301. As Blanton (Dispossessed Life, p. xvii) notes, Bre-
tons thought is similar here, where the cross in Bretons Paul signifies the pale void that ren-
ders inoperative the fullness of any ensemble or cultural form. See Stanislas Breton, The
Word and the Cross (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), ch. 4: The Cross and the
Powers, pp. 4762.
87. These powers in Pauls time the Roman Empire are how Agamben (Time that Remains,
pp. 10811) identifies Pauls cryptic concept of the katechon (restrainer) in II Thessalonians
2:39. Agamben thus reads Pauls katechon negatively as obfuscating the truth of lawlessness
in messianic time in contrast to Carl Schmitts reactionary reading, which would rather cele-
brate the capacity of profane power to hold back lawlessness (Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of
the Earth [Candor: Telos Press, 2003], pp. 5962). This difference between a revelatory and
an obfuscatory relation to lawlessness is found also in Agambens treatment of biopolitics
(Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life [Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1998], p. 51). Biopolitical nihilism captures (i.e. exploits while also hiding)
the nothing of bare life rather than messianically living in it.
88. Agamben, Time that Remains, p. 111.
89. ibid. This point is reiterated in The Kingdom and the Glory, where Agamben claims that Pau-
line messianism must be understood as a corrective to the demonic hypertrophy of angelic
and human powers (Kingdom and Glory, p. 166).
90. Agamben, Time that Remains, p. 62.
91. ibid.: 65, 67.
92. ibid.: 69, 68.

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Baker 21

93. ibid.: 76, 101, 701. See also Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, in
Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968).
94. Agamben, Time that Remains, p. 75.
95. ibid.: 77.
96. ibid.: 25. This abstract understanding of messianism as given in The Time that Remains
acquires a more concrete reading in Agambens study of monasticism, The Highest Poverty:
Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013). Here
Agamben explicitly links monastic flight from the world to the possibility of new forms
of life/community: Exile from the world is first of all a political gesture that . . . is equiv-
alent to the constitution of a new community (ibid.: 4851).
97. Again, this characterization of messianism in its contradistinction to nihilism comes across
clearly in Agambens The Highest Poverty (pp. 1202). Agamben identifies Franciscan mon-
asticism (which he sees as eclipsing contemporary monastic orders and religious movements
of the Middle Ages in its radicalism) with an anomic emphasis on poverty rather than office.
Because the early Franciscan community is thus defined by form-of-life rather than law, it
knows nothing of the anti-clericalism that defined contemporary movements. Francis could
give to the Church what is the Churchs without polemic, namely the administration of the
officium that belongs to it (ibid.: 120). Although religious movements contemporary to Fran-
ciscanism also emphasized poverty, they did not succeed in disassociating themselves from
institutions and law as the Franciscans did, something that is revealed in their always putting
themselves forward as the true Church in opposition to Rome (ibid.: 212).
98. Gershom Scholem, Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition
(New York: the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1965), p. 65;

And when he [the prime parent or demiurge] had come to know in truth that an
immortal man of light had been existing before him, he was greatly disturbed; for
he had previously said to all the gods and their angels, It is I who am god. No other
one exists apart from me. For he had been afraid they might know that another had
been in existence before him, and might condemn him. But he, being devoid of under-
standing, scoffed at the condemnation and acted recklessly. He said, If anything has
existed before me, let it appear, so that we may see its light. And immediately,
behold! Light came out of the eighth heaven above and passed through all of the hea-
vens of the earth. When the prime parent saw that the light was beautiful as it radiated,
he was amazed. And he was greatly ashamed. (On the Origin of the World, Gnostic
text from the Nag Hammadi Library), accessible @: http://gnosis.org/naghamm/
origin.html

99. In a more recent text on political theology, The Kingdom and the Glory, Agamben does admit
a connection, but only in the sense of a Gnostic radicalization of the Pauline dualism
between the spirit and the flesh (ibid.: 33).
100. Taubes, Political Theology of Paul, p. 56.
101. And this strategy, according to Taubes, always remains the same, whichever Gnosticism we
are talking about (Cult to Culture, p. 74). Indeed, even the Cathars in early 12th-century Lan-
guedoc, though a long way from late ancient Gnosticism, retained this radical dualism. See
Le Roy Laduries classic study of the last outbreak of the Cathar sect for abundant evidence

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22 Philosophy and Social Criticism

of this: Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village
12941324 (London: Scolar Press, 1978).
102. Badiou, St Paul, p. 35; Taubes, Political Theology of Paul, p. 56.
103. Taubes, ibid.: 57; Taubes, Cult to Culture, p. 86.
104. ibid.: 81. Taubes teacher, Gershom Scholem, presumably put him on to this link between
Paul and Gnosis see Scholem, Jewish Gnosticism, pp. 1419, and Gershom Scholem,
Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2011), ch. 8; and Taubes,
Political Theology of Paul, pp. 23, 50. This said, Taubes does not think that Paul is fully
Gnostic given his disagreement with the Corinthian church (which Taubes argues must
have had a Gnostic view of redemption and the redeemer) in which Paul makes much of the
exclusion of sophia while also refusing to read the crucifixion in the radically spiritualized
way characteristic of Gnosticism (Taubes, Cult to Culture, pp. 801).
105. Badiou, St Paul, p. 34.
106. Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Oakland, CA: University of
California Press, 1994), pp. 185, 290, n. 5. For a fully developed, if controversial, thesis on
the Gnostic Paul, see Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Paul: Gnostic Exegesis of the Pauline Let-
ters (London: Continuum, 1992).
107. Of course, Platonism can also be seen, following Nietzsche, as devaluing the world which is
now seen as a mere shadow-play of appearances in contrast to the bright realm of timeless,
transcendent, forms. But Platonism does not condemn nature for its perishability. Thus the
2nd-century neo-Platonist, Plotinus, denounced the Gnosticism of his day for identifying the
demiurge who created the world with evil, for thinking very well of themselves, and very ill
of the universe (in Pagels, The Gnostic Paul, p. 145). Platos demiurge in the Timaeus is in
no sense a malevolent creator. See also Taubes for the similar thesis that Gnostic language,
while no doubt a variant of Platonism at the historical-philosophical level, involves a revolt
and provocation against the world that is unknown to Platonism (Jacob Taubes, Occidental
Eschatology [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), p. 119).
108. Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, p. 78. The most influential critic of the Gnostic
legacy in modern politics, Eric Voegelin, argued that western modernity has been driven and
destabilized by the attempt to make Gnostic categories immanent in history; see Eric Voe-
gelin, The New Science of Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1952),
p. 126. Secularized forms of Gnosticism such as Hegelianism and especially its offspring,
Marxism have obscured the ancient wisdom of the cycle of birth and death, which Voegelin
views as a fundamental principle of existence (ibid.: 167). The Gnostic eschaton as that
which will finally break with eternal return is viewed by Voegelin as something like exis-
tences counterprinciple (ibid).
109. Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, p. 140.
110. That is, the Kingdom (Father) glorifies the Son (Government) and vice versa in a never-
ending, but empty, glorying/governmental machine (Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory,
p. 211).
111. ibid.: 140.
112. Taubes, Cult to Culture, p. 74.
113. ibid. See also Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, 1979), p. 129.
114. Taubes, Cult to Culture, pp. 119, 75; emphasis added.
115. ibid.: 102.

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Baker 23

116. ibid.: 75.

117. ibid.: 103.
118. Pagels, Gnostic Gospels, pp. 323, 37.
119. See Susan Taubes, The Gnostic Foundations of Heideggers Nihilism, The Journal of
Religion 34(3) (1954): 15572.
120. Agamben, Time that Remains, p. 61. Though Taubes reminds us with a few choice passages
from his letters of Pauls palpable sense of the end being near (Taubes, Political Theology of
Paul, pp. 534).
121. Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009),
pp. 33, 40.
122. See ibid. for more on the intimate relationship between Gnosticism and apocalypticism.
While there is a vigorous debate about whether Gnosticism predated the forms it took in the
early Christian era, Taubes (Occidental Eschatology) and Scholem (Jewish Gnosticism)
argue that its genealogy includes, at the least, pre-Christian Jewish mysticism, if not Zoroas-
trianism also. Regardless, there is a lot of evidence that Gnostic wisdom does not arise in the
Christian community in the 2nd century, as is usually claimed, but right from the start
(Taubes, Cult to Culture, p. 88).
123. Genealogy aside, can any messianism distance itself completely from apocalypticism (a nihi-
listic relation to this world) without falling prey to the aestheticized messianism which
Taubes (Political Theology of Paul, pp. 756) denounced as the Goethe religion of German
Idealism and its descendants in the first generation of the Frankfurt School?
124. Taubes, Cult to Culture, p. 68.
125. Pagels, Gnostic Gospels, p. 37.
126. James R. Payton, Irenaeus on the Christian Faith: A Condensation of Against Heresies
(Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2011), p. 135.
127. Gold (Jacob Taubes: 1523) summarizes nicely this central theme of Taubes: apocalypse
undermined the prevailing Hellenic-Roman values of harmony and order. Unmasking these
ideas as further manifestations of a naturalized consciousness that harnesses life to fate in the
name of order, apocalypse revealed the hidden complicity of law with myth.

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