ST. PAUL AMONG THE PHILOSOPHERS, edited by John D.

Caputo and Linda Martn Alcoff, Bloomington and Indianpolis: Indiana University Press, 2009, ix + pp. 195, Pbk, 14.99. ISBN-13-978-0253220837. St. Paul among the Philosophers casts a critical eye on the recent philosophical appropriation of St. Paul by putting the ideas of Alain Badiou, and to a lesser extent Slavoj Zizek and Giorgio Agamben, into dialogue with historians and biblical scholars. As the coeditor of the volume John D. Caputo puts it, the volume points out the difficulties encountered in the exchange between the systematizers (philosophers but also the theologians) who want to put Paul to a contemporary purpose and the historians who are interested in reconstituting the original context of Pauls work (1). The original impetus for the edited volume St. Paul among the Philosophers was the first annual Postmodernism, Culture, and Religion conference held at Syracuse University in April 2005. These conferences, of which there were finally four, were a continuation of the popular conference series Religion and Postmodernism held at Villanova University until the early years of this past decade. The driving personality behind both conference series was Caputo, former Professor of Philosophy at Villanova who finished his career as a Professor of Religion and Humanities at Syracuse University. He serves as co-editor of this volume along with Linda Martn Alcoff and his opening introduction serves as a good introduction to the recent revival of interest in Paul by philosophers. Alain Badious Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Standford UP, 2003), originally published in French in 1997, began the philosophical engagement with the ideas of Paul where, with utter disregard for Pauls importance in the Christian tradition and hoping to put Paul to a secular purpose, he argued for Paul as representing the ideal of a militant breaking with what Badiou terms the state of the situation (or the status quo in common language) in total commitment and faith to a truth-event. This counter-intuitive project of looking to a one of the foundational thinkers of Christianity was taken up by a number of other European thinkers, including Zizek and Agamben, and the publication and translation of their texts into English was met with enthusiasm from those working in the borderlands between philosophy and religion and philosophy and theology. I must confess to myself never fully understanding the turn to Paul by these radical philosophers and found that their studies of Paul usually served to illustrate some aspect of their philosophy. This suspicion is expressed well by one of the historians in the volume, Paula Fredriksen, who writes, I wish that the practitioners of such projects would say, I interpret Paul this way, this is what Paul means to me, a hermeneutical claim, rather than this is what Paul means, a historical claim. As a historical claim, such assertions can only be anarchronistic; and an acachronistic historical claim can only be false, whatever ideological merit it might otherwise display (72). Still, these works did mark, interestingly, a different kind of turn to religion than the one witnessed amongst phenomenologists in the 1980s and 1990s. Yet, unlike those often pious phenomenologists (it was often unclear when they

were being philosophers and when they were doing confessional theology by different means), philosophers like Badiou and Zizek have a rather different, more antagonistic, relationship with religion altogether. While it would be wrong to claim that they are unable to tell us anything interesting about religious practice or religious thought, their vision of Paul still seemed more a philosophical persona to illustrate certain aspects of their own philosophies rather than an actual ally or even lasting resource in their quest for a secular and Communist universalism. This suspicion isnt abated when reading Badious and Zizeks own contributions to the volume. Badious chapter is simply a summary of his Paul book, which, being remarkable in its economy and elegant in its prose, should be useful for new readers but adds nothing new for those already familiar with his philosophy. Zizeks contribution is simply dire. Zizeks real contribution to the philosophical discussion of Paul, one markedly different from Badious, is found in his early major work The Ticklish Subject (Verso, 2000), but rather than trying to update that discussion or add to it, Zizeks chapter is instead on his current favorite contrarian G.K. Chestertons book on the Job. While the chapter in itself isnt a bad piece of work, though many of the ideas are repeated in his contribution to the Monstrosity of Christ (MIT Press, 2009), it is insulting to his readers to pretend, as he does with his title, that it is a Paulinian reading of Chesterton. The two chapters from Badiou and Zizek constitute the first part of the book entitled St. Paul among the Philosophers. Strangely the next section, even though it isnt reflected in the volumes title, is much longer and is called Paul between Jews and Christians. It includes major scholars in Pauline studies like E.P. Sanders, Dale B. Martin, Paula Fredriksen, and Daniel Boyarin. A contribution from Richard Kearney is also included in this section (Kearney stood in for Agamben when Agamben pulled out of the conference), but it isnt clear to me why this contribution, aside from being a critique of Badious and Agambens more radical political readings of Paul, was not included in the first section. Kearneys contribution does a nice job of showing the marked differences between the dominant phenomenological theological turn and the current batch of radical philosophical readings of religion, but it also shows a surprising similarity. While, on the one hand, Kearney pays more lip service to the historians work, his own philosophical and political use of Paul remains mired in aporia liberalism. So the kenotic self-empyting of Christ witnessed to in Pauls celebration of God choosing what was was not to shame what was or the weak to shame what was illustrates Kearneys own celebration of weak thought. Just like Badiou and Zizek (and also Agamben who Kearney is the only contributor to address), Kearney subsumes Pauls thought into his own and presents Paul as a kind of philosophical persona acting out Kearneys philosophical vision. The other contributors to this section are having their own inter-disicinplinary arguments, likely not of specific interest to philosophical readers. What is interesting to note for the purpose of this review is the central philosophical focus of these historians. In each case the central philosopher whose work the historian dialogues with is that of Badiou. Fredriksens contribution is the most direct confrontation with the philosophical

appropriation of Badiou, where Sanders and Martin seem to want to encourage the kind of work Badiou has undertaken (after all, Paul is the figure theyve devoted their own lives to) while trying to fill out the picture of Paul and complicate the vision of the ideal militant of universalism present in Badious work. Sanders sums this up nicely when he writes, I realize that people want Paul to have only one thought on such an important theological topic as exclusivism and universalism: the salvation of some versus the salvation of all. Alas! He had two thoughts (88). The most interesting contribution in the historical section comes from Rabbinic scholar Daniel Boyarin, whose engagement with Badious reading of Paul goes deeper than the others. Boyarins contribution really blurs the lines between philosophy and historical study in a way that none of the other contributions does and that includes Badious own. The volume includes a written transcript of the concluding roundtable discussion, which included all the plenary speakers, and in that discussion interesting political alliances can be seen. While Kearney tries to put himself on the side of the historians in a scholarly capacity, he finds his own characterization of the political division of the speakers, separating some into fighting universalists and others *(like himself) into pacifists rebuffed by Boyarin. Boyarin, famously anti-Zionist on Rabbinic grounds, quite boldly aligns himself with the strident militancy of Badiou and Zizek. In his written contribution to the volume Boyarin offers his own scholarly weight to Badious reading of Paul as a militant, but provides an intriguing and interesting defense of sophistry on the basis of Pauls militancy. In short, against Pauls Platonic idea of philosophy, Boyarin shows how Pauls own practice of making the weaker cause the stronger is at the heart of his faithfulness to the truth-event of the death and resurrection of Christ. To conclude, the volume is a perfect introduction to debates around the recent philosophical readings of Paul. It has some weaknesses, but, aside from being rather Badioucentric, they are weaknesses inherent to the debate itself. It is worth pointing out that, strangely, the historians provide more reason for a student to question the importance of Pauls thought for political action and philosophical contemplation than the strident secularists like Badiou and Zizek do. So, it is unsurprising that we find Christian theological appropriations of Badious thesis celebrating that even the atheist philosophers have to acknowledge Christianitys vital place in the development of universalism. This volume may, if nothing else, disabuse these triumphalists of their secure foundations and embolden the secular thinkers to not merely rest on St. Paul as their foundation.