de-dialectizing

Proper 15 (20) Year A - Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32
11:1 I ask, then, has God rejected his people? By no means! I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin.
11:2a God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew. Do you not know what the scripture says of Elijah, how he pleads with God against Israel?
11:29 for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.
11:30 Just as you were once disobedient to God but have now received mercy because of their disobedience,
11:31 so they have now been disobedient in order that, by the mercy shown to you, they too may now receive mercy.
11:32 For God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all.

Strange choice: to break up a section of text, leaving a rhetorical question hanging – thus making it cease to be rhetorical and to become a question of knowing or not knowing. So, “do you not know?” Whether or not one knows, what will be clear to the hearers of this week’s text is that of the total irrevocability of a promise.

The final verses are dialectical in their reasoning: the total negation of innocence in order that this negation of innocence might be negated. Mercy is the result.
Nothing, it seems, is outside the totality – no innocence in guilt, no guilt in innocence. No remainder, no remnant.

But the remainder or the remnant is precisely the trope that sustains the argument Paul is developing here (in the occluded verses). It is not a totalizing or dialectical co-implication of guilt and mercy. Total guilt is thwarted by a remnant of the just and mercy is possible because of the minimal continuity of this thin thread of justice. This reasoning is not dialectical and the totalizing that does emerge is a totalizing that is absolute: it is that which absolves itself from any dialectical movements of history. If the eschaton is history’s telos, it is, from the perspective of the historical – the “profane” in Benjamin’s terms – not its completion or its supplement, but its (catastrophic) end.