Shawai 1

Atheer Shawai
GOVT 731
Professor Char Miller
May 10, 2016
Nietzsches, Agambens and Critchleys Views on the Negativity of the Pauline Political Conception

Paul the apostle (5 67) has been one of the most controversial figure in the entire history
of Christianity. This controversy goes along with all the fundamental doctrines he creates or
revalues based on his new faith in Christ and its implications for the entire world. Pauls shifting
of values includes a wide range of principles and beliefs that govern the relationship between the
faithful individual and the state, people, religion, morals and major concepts, such as time. One
of the most essential, innovative doctrines in the Pauline account is the law due to Pauls
unprecedented exceptional view and the enormous repercussions of this view for politics,
religion and individuality.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Simon Critchley (1960) use different approaches in
studying the motives, purposes and logic behind Pauls unique thoughts about the law. While
Nietzsche, through psychological cultural method, questions the objectivity of Paul by relating
his innovatory ideas about the law to his personal necessities and mentality, Critchley relies on
analytical and inductive approaches and other thinkers thoughts to examine a variety of
dimensions of the Pauline principle of the law. Regardless of Critchleys and other theorists
critique of Nietzsches position on Paul, by discussing Pauls revaluation of the law through a
context of related topics, especially, violence, faith, sin and gault, both Nietzsche and Critchley
ultimately agree on the negativity of the Pauline political conception.

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In his book, Daybreak (1881), Nietzsche discusses violence within a range of topics such
as punishment, sacrifice and revenge in the context of his criticism of the morality of his age and
the influence of Christianity in the Western mentality and values. Rather than looking only to
typical reasons behind certain phenomena, Nietzsche focuses his readers attentions to the hidden
impacts of old customs, natural inclinations, immediate reactions and environment on human
beings perspectives towards violent behaviors. As Nietzsche looks at violence from different
angles and levels, he explicitly shows forbearance towards violence as an obvious expression or
reaction to a situation or feeling. On the contrary, Nietzsche expresses intolerance for violent
reactions that do not appear on the surface, but rather take hidden forms of expressions and
passions due to political, intellectual or security reasons. For Nietzsche, ressentiment and pity are
the most fundamental manifestations of Christianitys nonviolent violence, which imposes them
through misrepresentation of values and belief in guilt.
Hence, Nietzsche looks at Christianity as a result of Pauls ressentiment of his
tremendous pain, which was caused by his inability to follow the strict of the Jewish Law and the
Laws suppression of his strong cravings. In this respect, Nietzsche states that:
The law was the cross to which he felt himself nailed: how he
hated it! ... He says to himself here is perfect revenge, here and
nowhere else do I have and hold the destroyer of the law. Sick with
the most tormented pride, at stroke he feels himself recovered, the
moral despair is as if blown away, destroyed that is to say,
fulfilled, there on the Cross. (40-1)
Here Christianity appears as an expression of abhorrence towards Jewish Law and its heavy
obligations. Instead of a direct bloody confrontation with Judaism, Paul preferred to use Jesus

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crucifixion as an extraordinary event based on which he crucified the Jewish Law. Furthermore,
abolition of the law must be done according to the peaceful teachings of Jesus Christ. Thus, the
odious Pauls ressentiment against the domination of the law appears as Christian kindness and
sympathy. The grace of Christianity is nothing but the hidden ressentiment of a man who
suffered continuous suppressed anger, inclination for punishment (40), and dissatisfied longing
to obey the law which must continually prove itself unfulfillable and with irresistible magic
lures on to transgression (40). According to Nietzsche, based on everything above, Paul simply
misrepresents the values of life by showing his ressentiment and anger as love and kindness.
The hatred towards Paul, the first Christian, as Nietzsche calls him, finds its roots in
Judaism, since the Jews, according to Nietzsche, are experts of disguising hatred as love. Hence,
Nietzsche points out that it is where our deficiencies lie that we indulge enthusiasm. The
command love your enemies! had to be invented by the Jews, the best haters that ever been;
and the fairest glorifications of chastity has been penned by such as in their youth lived
dissoluteness (170). Such a disguise causes more suffering than plain, direct violence, since it
keeps pain unsolved, which causes exorbitant agony, self-hatred and remorse over time. In
contrast, immediate violence redeems people spontaneously from the harmful feelings of
revenge, ressentiment and hatred. In this context, Nietzsche points out that serious crimes such as
a murder occur as relational responses to relatively absurd motives or the timid nature of
certain people (413). In Daybreak, Nietzsche illustrates this point by referring to a
father who kills his son for no reason but is tormented all day by the wicked and
malicious behavior of the son (339). Yet, Nietzsche does not justify this sort of
violence as a natural response. Rather, he implicitly considers it an instinctive
inclination that should be controlled and not replaced with hatred and ressentiment

through misrepresentation.

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Simon Critchley, along with other intellectuals he cites in his book, The Faith of the
Faithless, especially Georgia Agamben (1942), takes a completely different point of view on the
subject. Ironically, these intellectuals critique of Nietzsche is similar to Nietzsches critique of
Paul since they attribute Nietzsches attitude towards the apostle to his repressed desires rather
than his logical thinking. On this point, Critchley shows his absolute agreement with Agamben
that Nietzsches call for a revaluation of values is based on a sheer jealousy of Pauls
achievement in bringing about such a revaluation (156). In other words, Nietzsche questions
Pauls revaluation of values because Paul has inspired Nietzsche to form his own revaluation; his
harsh criticism is meant to hide this source. Therefore, Critchley implies that on might have good
reason to diminish the importance of Nietzsches perspectives on Pauline revaluation of values.
Unlike Nietzsche, Critchley looks at the Pauline adoption of weakness as a creative way
to change the political order through his appreciation of faith. While Nietzsche attributes such a
revaluation to Pauls hatred of the law, Critchley prefers to see it as a political approach to free
oneself from religious subordination, state hegemony, and necessary dependence on the law.
Hence, Critchley pinpoints that in becoming slaves of the Messiah, we are asked to abandon our
secular, Roman life of freedom, and to assert our weakness. The power in being in Christ is a
powerless power. It is constituted by a call that exceeds human strength (160). This powerless
of power, or nonviolent violence, is not ressentiment, as described by Nietzsche. Rather, as
Critchley quotes from Gary Taubes, it is a negative political theory through which Paul
generates love. Nevertheless, Nietzsches and Taubes views do not contradict, since the views of
the latter assure that Pauls love is posted, in the first place, against the Jews and the Romans
(158). Thus, such love, is inseparable from hatred. Taubes account here would be identical with

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that of Nietzsches on Paul if Taubes considers Pauline hatred as the prime motive of Pauls love,
especially against the Jews.
Based on this relationship between love and hatred, Critchley politically links Pauls
negative political theology with Pauls strong belief on the right of the wretched of the
world, who are neither the Romans nor the Jews. By love that comes through faith, people who
are removed to the margin due to their lack of Romanian citizenship or the Jewish law will
revalue their weakness as strength. As Critchley assures, faith without love is a hollow clanging
that lacks the subjective commitment to endure (165). Love comes here to ascertain the
separation of faith from reason. As Critchely cites Agamben, love has no reason and needs
none. If it did, it would not be love. Pauline faith has the power of illusion by which the the
wretched of the world consider themselves the most powerful regardless of the reality and its
standards. There is no need for violence to seek power and dominate the world, since faith in
Christ without thinking logically is enough to free the weak from humiliation.
Rather, the weak is the strong due to faith through which weakness is the sign of loyalty
to the Christ, who was crowned as the savior of the word by this weakness itself. In Critchleys
words, Christ was crucified in weakness to become powerful through the resurrection (160).
The resurrection, on the followers part, is nothing but having faith in the ability of the savior to
return of the; the resurrection equals the second coming of the Christ before Judgment Day.
Without faith in such a resurrection, the waiting for the savior, the suspending of the law and the
revaluation of values have no meaning. Paul throws all his weight on the faith to shift the
mentality of the world towards the interest of the weak. As Critchley concludes, faith is an
announcement that enacts, a proclamation that bring the subject of faith into being (161).
Clearly, Paul replaces action, including violence, with faith. Instead of being a dominant power

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that takes the place of the strong forces such as the Romans, the faithful weak do nothing but
dissolve their forte. Moreover, the weak disporove the world from order. At this point, Critchley
assures, God has chosen things that are not in order to bring to nothing the things that are. This
is why we must become the filth of the world (178). Relying only on faith and completely
neglecting action will lead to disorder.
This political negativity of Paul will gradually change the world from activity and
secularism to waiting (suspension) and faith. Although this change comes without violence, it
has tremendous consequences. The nothingness that Critchley speaks about is not only located in
the world but within the human being, as well. Here, Critchley cites Heideggers thoughts on
Paul in this regard: the self is nothing but the movement between two nothings, the nothing of
thrownness, and the nothing of projection. Which is to say that the uncanniness of being human,
being a stranger to oneself, consists in a double impotentialization (187-8). If one agrees with
Heidegger, self-alienation and nihilism, in the sense of the self is thrown into the nothingness of
the world (187). As Critchley highlights, it seems that there is no big difference between
Nietzsches judgment on this subject and that of Heidegger. The cast of taking away action,
activity, order and the law, and replacing it with an internal conviction based on faith without
reason as a powerless power will also lead to internal turmoil because of dissonance between
reality and beliefs. This turmoil appears in the form of harmful pity, psychological disorders, and
abnormal feelings of guilt. As such a description plainly appears in Nietzsches thoughts on Paul,
it also emerges (but less explicitly) in Critchleys and other theorists account.
Along with ressentiment, Nietzsche considers sin and guilt as other manifestations of
nonviolent violence when it belongs to Christian values. Nietzsche thinks that Christianitys
excessive focus on sin and guilt weakens the vitality of humankind. Under the call for love of

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humanity, Christianity establishes contagious suffering as the cornerstone of its morality.
According to Nietzsche, the tendency of Christianity towards guilt comes from its fondness of
suffering, self-denial, psychological torment, and the denial of the flesh. This sort of nonviolent
violence, or what Nietzsche calls it, the torments of the soul (46), is more fatal than explicit
violence. Furthermore, it is unseen, and this invisibility disables humans from recognizing and
putting an end to it as it stops in wide range physical torture against human beings and animals.
In aphorism 77 of Daybreak, Nietzsche stresses the cruelty of psychological torture in
Christianity, and he closely ties this torture with feelings of guilt:
Christianity has made use of them [torments of the soul] on an
unheard-of scale and continues to preach this species of torture;
indeed, it complains quite innocently of falling-off and growing
lukewarm when it encounters those who are not in this state of
torment - all with the result that even today mankind regards spiritual
death-by-fire, spiritual torture and instruments of torture, with the
same anxious toleration and indecision as it formerly did the
cruelties inflicted on the bodies of men and animal. (46)
Christianity puts the individual in a vicious circle of crucial and painful feelings of guilt due to
its doctrine of the Original Sin. As Nietzsche assures, Paul is responsible of not only embedding
guilt and sin in Christianity but also of considering death as the consequence of sin while faith in
the Christ is associated with immortality. Nietzsche adds that Paul uses the promise of life after
death to control people and impose his autocratic power over them. Paul paves the way for
threatening the masses, and henceforward, un- Jewish addition of Hell became a welcome
instrument in the hands of proselytisers (44). Instead of the law, Paul relies on the promise of

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life after death to manage people. However, Paul turns Christianity from a peaceful movement
that frees people from fear into a hateful religion by which people are manipulated by the horror
of the final judgment. Besides suspending life waiting for the second coming of the Christ, Paul
replaces the law with a hidden law that degrades, through sin and guilt, the value of the actual
life in the sake of an imaginary one after death.
Similar to Nietzsche, Critchley points out the strong connection in the Pauline theology
between the law and sin. He rephrases Paul in this matter by stating that if the law was not fully
within me, as the awareness of my fallenness and consciousness of sin, then faith as the
overcoming of the law would mean nothing (203). Sin and the law are inseparable in the
Pauline revaluations of values. Without the law, there is no sin, and without unrighteousness,
there is no need for the law. Critchley clarifies this point by quoting Paul: If it had not been for
the law, I should not have known sin (Rom.7:7) (203). In addition, Critchley remarks, as
Nietzsche does, that Paul does not only strongly link sin with the law, but he also closely ties it
with death through the doctrine of the Original Sin. Yet, Paul refuses to attribute sin to God since
He is the one who makes the first law without which man would live innocently forever in
Paradise. Rather, Paul thinks, as Critchley notes, that the idea of the law is to show the
sinfulness of sin in order to emphasize the difference between the spirituality of the law and
the carnality of the human being (204). The spirituality here represents the soul and the mind,
while the carnality refers to the body and its desires.
This separation between the soul and the body in light of the law and sin in the context of
stresses on human inability to follow the law entails the act of contempt for the body and selfalienation. Hence, Critchley explains how the inability to obey obeying the law leads to such
consequences:

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The self is here radically divided between flesh and spirit. On the
one hand there is my delight in the law of God, which belongs to
my inmost self (Rom. 7:22). but, on the other hand, I see
another law at war with the law of my mind (Rom. 7:23). But
inmost and outermost are not two selves, but two halves of the
same self which is divided against itself: Talaiporos
ego Anthropos, Paul exclaims, Wretched man that I
am! (Rom. 7:24). The dialectic of law and sin is fatal and it
divides the self from itself. (204).
This Pauline dilemma is made to only be solved by metaphysical power, that is, the salvation of
Jesus Christ. At this point, Critchley highlights Pauls sentence through which he replaces the
law with his own new law: It is the law of the Spirit that can set me free from the law of sin and
death (Rom. 8.2) (205). Therefore, as Critchley sums up, salvation should not be made possible
by human will, choice or wisdom because redemption is not something that can be willed: You
are not your own. All that can be willed is the dialectic of law and sin. Redemption exceeds the
limit of the human potentiality and renders us impotent (205).
Thus, according to Paul, the humanity is connected to two sides: falling is the Original
Sin and the salvation is resurrection. Between the two, hope of redemption is possible, but it
requires waiting and patience. Based on this understanding, as Critchley suggests, neither
freedom nor salvation can exist without sin and guilt, since they require each other. As law
entails sin due to the human inability of following the law, sin opens up the possibility of
salvation through the power of faith. In Critchleys words, they are both our power and our
constitutive powerless (206).

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Although Critchley is fully aware of the importance of the negativity in Pauls account of
law and its relationship with sin, Critchleys point of view is not identical with Nietzsches.
According to Critchley, The negativity or powerlessness is an inseparable part of power, while in
Nietzsches point of view, negativity includes and is embedded in the entire Pauline theology.

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As also noted by Badiou, for Agamben, Paul is the paradigmatic model of
faith in Christ ... between secularism and the messianic is The Time That
Remains. ... to produce a 'negative political theology' (Taubes 2004: 72;
Agamben 2005: 1)

The messianic vocation is the revocation of every

vocation. In this way, it defines what to me seems to be
the only acceptable vocation. What is a vocation, but
the revocation of each and every concrete factical
vocation? This obviously does not entail substituting a
less authentic vocation with a truer vocation. According
to what norm would one be chosen over the other? No,
the vocation calls the vocation itself, as though it were
an urgency that works it from within and hollows it out,
nullifying it in the very gesture of maintaining and
dwelling in it. This, and nothing less than this, is what it
means to have a vocation, what it means to live in
messianic klesis. 23-4.

The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans By

Giorgio Agamben

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Also for Agamben, understanding the messianic community in the messianic

time means understanding Paul's conception of law and faith. "If we want to
comprehend the meaning that underlies the opposition between pistis and
nomos in the Pauline text, we should keep in mind this rooting of faith in the
sphere of the lawor rather, in prelaw, that is, where law, politics, and
religion become tightly interwoven. In Paul, pistis retains something of the
deditio, the unconditional self abandoned to the power of another, which
obliges the receiver as well" (116). Paul's messianic community, according to
Agamben, does not merely separate Jew from non-Jew, but from this a third
contingent emerges. Agamben looks to the importance of "I Corinthians
9:20-21, in which [Paul] defines his position with regard to the division Jew
'under the law,' and non-Jew 'without law' according to the expression 'as
without law, not without the law of God, but in the law of the Messiah.' [In
other words] He who keeps himself in the messianic law is not-not in the law"
(51). The messianic community in messiah time are the "non-non's" in the
"now" time. But what does it mean to be a non-non in this now time, as
opposed to being under the law or to being without law? For Agamben, Paul's
interruption of the law, this ceasura, is the answer. "I think at this point it
becomes clear why we can say that in Paul's setting pistis and nomos against
each other, he does not merely oppose two heterogeneous elements. Rather,
he brings into the fore two figures, two levels, or two elements that are
present within the lawor within prelawin order to play them against each

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other, so to speak" (118). By putting both the law and faith in tension, Paul
does not suggest a "chronos" time: first law, then faith, but a "kairos" time,
faith and law existing simultaneously. It is thus through messiah time, the
time of the now, that history, law, and religion find their commonality. What
is that commonality? For Agamben, their "strength is found in weakness,"
i.e., their inability to fulfill themselves. "The messianic is the instance, in
religion and equally in law, of an exigency of fulfillment whichin putting
origin and end in a tension with each otherrestores the two halves of
prelaw in unison. At this same moment, it shows the impossibility of them
ever coinciding. But in this, it points, beyond prelaw, toward an experience of
the word, or taking itself as a thing, without ever being infinitely suspended
in its openness or fastening itself up in dogmamanifests itself as a pure
and common potentiality of saying, open to a free and gratuitous use of time
and the world" (136).

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Works Cited
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Daybreak: thoughts on the prejudices of morality. [1881] Trans. R.J.
Hollingdale. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]; New York: Cambridge University Press,
1997. Print.
Critchley, Simon. The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology. London and
New York: Verso, 2012. Print.