Advent Reflection 3: Isaiah Isaiah 35:1-10 & James 5:7-10

Isaiah 35:1-10
35:1 The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus
35:2 it shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing. The glory of Lebanon shall be given to it, the majesty of Carmel and Sharon. They shall see the glory of the LORD, the majesty of our God.
35:3 Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees.
35:4 Say to those who are of a fearful heart, "Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God. He will come with vengeance, with terrible recompense. He will come and save you."
35:5 Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped;
35:6 then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy. For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert;
35:7 the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water; the haunt of jackals shall become a swamp, the grass shall become reeds and rushes.
35:8 A highway shall be there, and it shall be called the Holy Way; the unclean shall not travel on it, but it shall be for God's people; no traveler, not even fools, shall go astray.
35:9 No lion shall be there, nor shall any ravenous beast come up on it; they shall not be found there, but the redeemed shall walk there.
35:10 And the ransomed of the LORD shall return, and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

Comment:
It starts to feel gratuitous, like fanning the flames of a forest fire, the recurrence of hopeful expectation. To make my intervention, this year, at the advent of Advent, is to miss the ups and downs – particularly the downs – of the liturgical year. Even if we are officially at the “beginning” of the year (Year A), liturgical time cycles, repeats, iterates itself. So to be at the beginning is also to be in the middle and even at the end. Into what suffering does this word of hope speak? The texts of the church’s calendar address themselves to two moments: the interpretively constructed moment of the lectionary – now we read Isaiah with Matthew instead of Jeremiah with Luke – and to the singular moment of the reading subject or community. The nature of my intervention cuts me off from the first moment; what of the second? Perhaps the images from nature offer hope to a planet whose finite “resources” are being quickly used up, to a creation who longs for redemption. Perhaps the lack of predatory creatures offers a vision of a world without predatory nation states.

James 5:7-10
5:7 Be patient, therefore, beloved, until the coming of the Lord. The farmer waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains.
5:8 You also must be patient. Strengthen your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is near.
5:9 Beloved, do not grumble against one another, so that you may not be judged. See, the Judge is standing at the doors!
5:10 As an example of suffering and patience, beloved, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord.

Comment:
Some differences emerge when we get to James. First, the expectation is given a more circumscribed referent: the church. Second, the (equivocal) content of the prophecy is slimed down to its most basic element: “The Lord is near.” Another difference is that the prophecy is not meant to bring an unbounded hope but it is accompanied by an explicit demand: “be patient.” Finally, in another “formalization” of the prophetic message, what a critical idealist might call a “purification of the mythical content,” the prophet is held up as a figure of patience and suffering, not as the bearer of a more important truth.

Advent Reflection 2b: Romans 15:4-13

Romans 15:4-13
15:4 For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope.
15:5 May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another, in accordance with Christ Jesus,
15:6 that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
15:7 Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.
15:8 For I tell you that Christ has become a servant of the circumcised on behalf of the truth of God in order that he might confirm the promises given to the patriarchs,
15:9 and in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy. As it is written, "Therefore I will confess you among the Gentiles, and sing praises to your name";
15:10 and again he says, "Rejoice, O Gentiles, with his people";
15:11 and again, "Praise the Lord, all you Gentiles, and let all the peoples praise him";
15:12 and again Isaiah says, "The root of Jesse shall come, the one who rises to rule the Gentiles; in him the Gentiles shall hope."
15:13 May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

The Christian destiny of the messianic prophecy is here given its formal structure. This is the hermeneutical context in which the church is to understand its place in the promise of God – as a grafted branch. Not, it is obvious here, as the sublation of Judaism, but as its supplement. If the church has a share in the promise, it is a share; i.e. that which it shares with Judaism. The shares are different, however. The keyword that distinguishes the Christian share is the one that Paul highlights here: hope. Hope is the crux of this text and hope is unique to Christianity vis-à-vis Judaism. Jews are, if Rosenzweig is correct, without hope. But what is the nature of this hopelessness? Hopelessness stems from a response to a lack – to that which is not-yet. Hope bridges the gap between the now and the not-yet and, in this case, its opposite would be despair. However, hopelessness can also be thought of prior to the lack; in which case the opposite of hope is not despair, but plenitude, a lack of lack, as it were. Jews, as Rosenzweig says, are already in eternity, they already in their liturgical practice – hourly, daily, monthly, yearly – bring eternity into the present. History, so he argues, is a detour that it does not follow. The Church, on the other hand, is not already in eternity, it must attain to it. And hope is what sustains us on this journey.

Advent Reflection 2: Isaiah 11:1-10 (Messianism: between Judaism and Christianty)

Isaiah 11:1-10
11:1 A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.
11:2 The spirit of the LORD shall rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD.
11:3 His delight shall be in the fear of the LORD. He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear;
11:4 but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth; he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.
11:5 Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist, and faithfulness the belt around his loins.
11:6 The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.
11:7 The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
11:8 The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder's den.
11:9 They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.
11:10 On that day the root of Jesse shall stand as a signal to the peoples; the nations shall inquire of him, and his dwelling shall be glorious.

Comment:
Here we are presented with messianic prophecy; messianism in one of its earliest forms. The full scope of the “messianic idea” will not come into view, Gershom Scholem tells us, until it is extended through the reflections of the rabbis and, even more importantly, the historical or “acute” messianisms, the popular messianic movements, that have punctuated the history of Judaism. Of course the problem with acute messianisms – and Christianity can be counted among them – is that its idea becomes subsumed in its figure: messianism, as it were, is abolished in the Messiah – Bar Kokba, Sabbatai Zvi, Jesus. In order for messianism to survive beyond the Messiah it must render each messianic figure, each messianic movement provisional or void. The moment the messianic idea becomes an acute messianism, all bets are off. It is for this reason that Scholem ends his reflections on the messianic idea with a calculation: the “cost of messianism” to the Jewish people. The tremendous richness of the idea has been subsidized by a refusal on the part of Jews to enter history (e.g. in the form of politicized messianic movements – Scholem has his version of Zionism in mind). By virtue of a certain kind of sublimation – a redirection of libidinal/messianic energy – the messianic idea comes to us in all of its intellectual and theoretical splendor.

The text from Isaiah arrives here (in the lectionary) in this moment (Advent) in the mode of a determinate expectation, not the indeterminate hope that conditioned its first announcement. There is a certain telos in view here. In its lectionary form, this prophecy is not merely messianic, but Christological. (Although the Gospel reading that this text supplements (Matt 3:1-12) is not yet Christological [perhaps proto-Christological], it too is still anticipatory: it is the story of John the Baptist’s preparation for the coming of the Messiah Jesus.) This is the Christian destiny of the messianic idea, it has allowed the Messiah to subsume messianism; and it had to for the sake of its own emergence and survival. I am not questioning the legitimacy of this move, but one potential (and often actual) consequence that results when we return, after the Messianic arrival, to a text like Isaiah’s is that the prophetic-predictive moment is privileged over the prophetic-political; the figure that is announced is given a greater importance than the messianic vocation. Thus, the figure who is the “shoot from the stump of Jesse” is given precedence over the task of judging with justice. If in Judaism the figure of the Messiah gives way to a universal human calling – such that the Messiah as an individual merely demonstrates or symbolically enacts what is the task of the messianic community, and ultimately the whole of creation – then in Christianity the messianic task gives way to its singular incarnation – the Christ. The messianic vocation does not thereby disappear in Christianity, it simply becomes refracted. The messianic community – the Church – is still subject to the demands of justice. Refraction does not diminish the demand, in fact it may even increase it such that the messianic community will do “greater works than” those of the Messiah (John 14:12).

Advent Reflection 1: Isaiah 2:1-5 and Romans 13:11-14

My reflections have been interrupted by the AAR meeting and time away -- I plan to post the paper I read at the conference (on Agamben's messianism), but I may be reading a version of the same paper at another conference, in which case I will hold off a little longer. In the meantime, Advent...

Isaiah 2:1-5
2:1 The word that Isaiah son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem.
2:2 In days to come the mountain of the Lord's house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it.
2:3 Many peoples shall come and say, "Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths." For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.
2:4 He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
2:5 O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the LORD!

Romans 13:11-14
13:11 Besides this, you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers;
13:12 the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light;
13:13 let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy.
13:14 Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.

Comment:
I want to read these texts together. Firstly, because they arrive together in the lectionary – not without someone else’s interpretive decision, of course; but also, because I don’t know what to do with the Isaiah text. I don’t know how to read today, as sacred, as normative, a text which celebrates a particularity, a place with such geo-graphical, -political, -theological significance and antagonism. My intuition is that the place of which this text speaks needs to be read in light of the time of which it speaks.

The text from Isaiah speaks of both place and time, but first of all of place. It is here to which the nations will stream, not for the establishment of a statist project, not out of a desire to force the coming of the kingdom by way of some prophetic blueprint (and thereby becoming what Rosenzweig calls a “tyrant of the Kingdom”), but for a justice that exceeds these orders; not to perform military service or to build “fences,” but to unlearn war.

The time of which the passage speaks is a time of the future, in “days to come.” That is, not now. The time is not ripe for such a place. I want to read Paul’s text along with this one, not because of a tacit superscessionism, but because, in Romans we get an intensification of the temporal dimension, and an effacement of the spatial. The time is no longer merely to-come, as salvation is, but it is now that the text summons us to. Not because the time has arrived for learning justice and unlearning war, but because we need to work, to wake in order to make it so. There is not promise so much as exigency, but it is also promise –; exigency without promise is messianic tyranny; promise without exigency is the neutralization of the messianic.

Proper 33: Isaiah 65:17-25

Isaiah 65:17-25

65:17 For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.
65:18 But be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating; for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight.
65:19 I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and delight in my people; no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it, or the cry of distress.
65:20 No more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a few days, or an old person who does not live out a lifetime; for one who dies at a hundred years will be considered a youth, and one who falls short of a hundred will be considered accursed.
65:21 They shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
65:22 They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat; for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be, and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands.
65:23 They shall not labor in vain, or bear children for calamity; for they shall be offspring blessed by the LORD-- and their descendants as well.
65:24 Before they call I will answer, while they are yet speaking I will hear.
65:25 The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox; but the serpent--its food shall be dust! They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, says the LORD.

Comment:
I’ve always been taken by the thought and the possibility of newness, of novelty to the point of a rupture with the old. This is partly the reason that the text for my wedding was one very close to verse 17, “Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” (Isaiah 43:18) My research into the different trajectories of the messianic idea – the inflationary and the deflationary traditions – have pushed me to think seriously about the idea of the unredeemablity of the world, such that eschatology would be a break without continuity, the end of this world as the condition for the next. Does such a thinking lead only to a politics “whose method,” according to Benjamin, “must be called nihilism”? Or, conversely, does the thinking of a (minimal) continuity require a politics whose method must be called liberalism?

This question does not need to be settled in order to read these texts, but it does give some sense of the difference between the possible destinies of a Christian and a Jewish interpretation; which also happens to reverse the political stakes. The Christian reading would be one in which the concrete references are transposed into an eschatological future. The houses would adorn streets of gold and the vineyards produce only the finest wine. The Jewish, on the other hand would hear these texts resonate among the houses and the vineyards of historical existence. These are, of course, caricatures and yield no lasting hermeneutical power, but it does attest to differences.

The text speaks of a redemption in which the injustices of the past are remedied. But it does not begin totally anew. Creation is the stopping point. The residues of created life are not erased in the interest of a complete novelty: death is not overcome, but deferred, labour is not superfluous, but immediately productive – from the land and from the body, predators are not now prey, but docile vegetarians. The exception is the serpent – the serpent continues on exactly as since Genesis: “The LORD God said to the serpent, "Because you have done this, cursed are you among all animals and among all wild creatures; upon your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life.” (3:14)

Redemption is thus neither a radical newness: that would be re-creation; nor a total continuity: that would be the opposite of redemption. Perhaps this is why it is said of the messianic era that it will be like this one with only a slight adjustment.

Proper 32 C: Haggai 1:15b-2:9

I’m going to begin a series of biblical reflections based on the revised common lectionary. I’m doing this first of all because I found my Lenten reflections of last year to be a worthwhile exercise – both as a Lenten discipline and as a hermeneutical practice. But I am also acting on an intuition that I have yet to fully articulate. It has something to do with an alternative practice of time. If I am attempting to elaborate a thinking of messianic time, then this will not be unconnected to notions of repetition, distention, contraction, etc….none of which are unconnected to the reading of sacred texts in a liturgical context.

Haggai 1:15b-2:9
1:15 on the twenty-fourth day of the month, in the sixth month.
2:1 In the second year of King Darius, in the seventh month, on the twenty-first day of the month, the word of the LORD came by the prophet Haggai, saying:
2:2 Speak now to Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, and to Joshua son of Jehozadak, the high priest, and to the remnant of the people, and say,
2:3 Who is left among you that saw this house in its former glory? How does it look to you now? Is it not in your sight as nothing?
2:4 Yet now take courage, O Zerubbabel, says the LORD; take courage, O Joshua, son of Jehozadak, the high priest; take courage, all you people of the land, says the LORD; work, for I am with you, says the LORD of hosts,
2:5 according to the promise that I made you when you came out of Egypt. My spirit abides among you; do not fear.
2:6 For thus says the LORD of hosts: Once again, in a little while, I will shake the heavens and the earth and the sea and the dry land;
2:7 and I will shake all the nations, so that the treasure of all nations shall come, and I will fill this house with splendor, says the LORD of hosts.
2:8 The silver is mine, and the gold is mine, says the LORD of hosts.
2:9 The latter splendor of this house shall be greater than the former, says the LORD of hosts; and in this place I will give prosperity, says the LORD of hosts.

Comment:
First a general comment about prophecy. Rosenzweig points out that God speaks both in human language and in a human voice. Divine speech is not merely mediated, but contingent upon, a human voice: the voice of the prophet.

The prophet is not a mediator between God and man, and he does not receive Revelation so that he can transmit it further; on the contrary the voice of God comes from him immediately, out of him God speaks immediately as I. In contrast to the master who committed the great plagiarism of Revelation, the true prophet lets God speak and transmits to the amazed audience the Revelation that took place in secret. Strictly speaking, it is not at all that he lets God speak, but at the moment [when] he opens his mouth, it is already God who is speaking; the prophet scarcely has time to start with the formula: “Thus speaks the Eternal One [Lord]” or with the still briefer and quicker formula that dispenses even with the verbal form, “Word of the Eternal One [Lord],” and before God has taken possession of his lips the I of God remains the root word resounding through Revelation like a pedal-note, it rises in protest against any translation by He, it is I and must remain so. Only an I and not a He can speak the imperative of love; it must never say anything except: love me. (192)

I have commented before on the role of the imperative in Rosenzweig. Here the general point about prophecy holds true. It is not Haggiai who speaks, but the “word of the Lord.” This is not to say that the biblical text does not narrate theophanic moments, but, on the one hand, these are the exception more than the rule; secondly, the result tends to be less than ideal. So, for instance, the paradigmatic theophany of the Hebrew scriptures – the appearance of God to Moses at Sinai – is in immediate proximity to the embarrassment of the Golden Calf; the originary encounter between God and man in the Garden is one of shame and banishment.

The divine voice that resounds in the prophet’s mouth speaks of hope, restoration, prosperity. But, the condition of this hope is the ruin of the present. “Who is left among you that saw this house in its former glory? How does it look to you now? Is it not in your sight as nothing?” The truth of the present is its ruin, what is phrased as a question is in truth a proposition: what was is no more. Courage is offered to the weak, the ruined; not the strong and the established, such would not be courage, but haughtiness, pride. Furthermore, the promise of restoration is not merely a repetition, but a deep repetition. That is, it is not simply the rebuilding of a house that has been destroyed: it is the recurrence of an old redemption (from Egypt) and an older creation (of the world). This is also an iteration – a non-identical repetition – insofar as the new does not start from scratch, but combines creation and redemption in a single act. The work God performs on the earth (“shaking”) this time does not bring forth natural produce, but cultural produce: “the treasures of the nations.” Finally, these treasures do not cycle back into an exchange economy, they are not simply expropriated from a nation or nations and appropriated by another (Israel), but they return in a similarly deep repetition to their originary source: “The silver is mine, and the gold is mine, says the LORD of hosts.”

Lenten Reflection 5b: Philippians 3:4b-14

Philippians 3:4b-14
3:4b If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more:
3:5 circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee;
3:6 as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.
3:7 Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ.
3:8 More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ
3:9 and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith.
3:10 I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death,
3:11 if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.
3:12 Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.
3:13 Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead,
3:14 I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.

Comment:
Paul here sets up a series of oppositions: between life according to the law and life according to faith, and he himself is the test case. The structure is not symmetrical, however. Paul’s list of credentials with respect to the “flesh” (sarx) are extensive: Circumcised, Israelite, Tribe of Benjamin, Pharisee, Zealous, Righteous. Yet on the other side, his achievements under Christ, we find only “the loss of all things” the greatest possible attainment: to become like Christ in his death. The shift from law to faith, from flesh to Christ (or spirit) represents a kind of emptying or hollowing out, a negation. (There is almost a hint of resentment here -- “look what I had, look what I have given up!”). This experience is not, for Paul, an exchanging of one religious content for another, it is the undoing of all religious content, the subjective appropriation, not of a ritual, but of a singular – indeed the most singular – act: death. But this total emptying, this taking up of death stops short of a Heideggerian “being-towards-death” insofar as there remains, for Paul, a life beyond death – the most proper or authentic possibility is not, as it is for Heidegger, the possibility of one’s own impossibility. There is a need to go through this impossible possibility but there is a possibility in excess of this: resurrection. A resurrection, not guaranteed, but hoped for, “strained towards.” The life of faith is a life negated, emptied. Thus, a kind of lack remains in place of religious content, a lack that induces desire for “what lies ahead.”

Lenten Reflection 5a: Isaiah 43:16-21

Isaiah 43:16-21
43:16 Thus says the LORD, who makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters,
43:17 who brings out chariot and horse, army and warrior; they lie down, they cannot rise, they are extinguished, quenched like a wick:
43:18 Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old.
43:19 I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.
43:20 The wild animals will honor me, the jackals and the ostriches; for I give water in the wilderness, rivers in the desert, to give drink to my chosen people,
43:21 the people whom I formed for myself so that they might declare my praise.

Comment:
The possibility of novelty, of the utterly new, is a consistent theme of emancipatory political thinking, but, before that, it is the concern of an ancient people and a more ancient God. If there were a common thread that could unite all of the failings of biblical people it would be the incapacity to imagine the new, the temptation to settle for what “is” as opposed to being attuned to what “happens” – this is Badiou’s distinction between the order of being and the order of the event.

The “new thing” that is about to happen concerns another repetition: Israel has gone from desert to promised land and now returned to the “desert,” this time in the form of exile. But just as the desert, a place of lack and scarcity became the site of sustaining abundance, the new “desert,” a place of political subservience and religious compromise, is a place which will not remain hidden from divine generosity. Water will cover the dryness of the desert, justice will bisect the sovereignty of empire (Amos 5:24 But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.).

Lenten Reflection 4b: 2 Corinthians 5:16-21

2 Corinthians 5:16-21
5:16 From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way.
5:17 So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!
5:18 All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation;
5:19 that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.
5:20 So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.
5:21 For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

Comment
I spoke earlier of Paul’s biopolitics – such that the passage to redemption is corporal. Here is yet another perspective on this biopolitics. Agamben argues, at the conclusion of Homo Sacer, contra Foucault, that there is no escape from the biopolitical predicament: every body is always already a biopolitical body. Thus, the “new economy of bodies and pleasures” that Foucault gestures towards at the end of History of Sexuality 1 is not really conceivable. Foucault, as far as Agamben is concerned, is not critical enough with his concepts. It is not merely a new relation between body and pleasure that is necessary but a, in some sense, a new body, a new corporal destiny. Further, this new body cannot be the return to an old body, there can be no nostalgia for a pre-biopolitical existence -- “There is no return from the camps to classical politics” (187).

In Paul we find something like the possibility of a new corporal destiny, not in terms of an escape from bodily existence – as it sometimes sounds in 2 Corinthians – but in terms of a participation in another future for the body: “we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves but for him who died and was raised for him” – these are the words that immediately precede our text. These are the conditions under which Paul can claim that “if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation.” There is here the possibility of not just a new relation between body and world, but the possibility of a new body, of a new site for a biopolitical resistance to biopolitics. In this way Paul represents a possible completion of Agamben’s project to found a new politics which would be a zoe which is its own bios – this, by the way, is not a possibility that Agamben names in his Paul book.

Lenten Reflection 4a: Joshua 5:9-12

Joshua 5:9-12
5:9 The LORD said to Joshua, "Today I have rolled away from you the disgrace of Egypt." And so that place is called Gilgal to this day.
5:10 While the Israelites were camped in Gilgal they kept the passover in the evening on the fourteenth day of the month in the plains of Jericho.
5:11 On the day after the passover, on that very day, they ate the produce of the land, unleavened cakes and parched grain.
5:12 The manna ceased on the day they ate the produce of the land, and the Israelites no longer had manna; they ate the crops of the land of Canaan that year.

Comment
Rosenzweig describes Jewish liturgical practice as a circular repetition – the Torah scroll is unrolled, rolled, read, re-read the same way, year by year – this is what situates Jews already in eternity. Eternity is brought into the moment, an infinite now, by this repetition. But how? "There is only one way out," says Rosenzweig, "the moment we are seeking must, since it has flown away, begin again already at the same moment, in the sinking away it must already begin again; its perishing must be at the same time its beginning again (307).

In the text from Joshua, Israel, finally on the far side of the Jordan, undertakes the first repetition of the Passover. The initial meal was not yet liturgical, it was singular, the (violent) act of divine liberation: the manifestation of God’s unrivaled power and deep solidarity. It was the event that finally lead Pharoh to (provisionally) concede and release Israel from bondage. Now, in this first repetition the experience of Egypt is both maintained and erased – we might even say it undergoes a sort of Aufhebung or sublation. Such a repetition is enacted in order to serve as a reminder to this generation and those that follow: “And when your children ask you, 'What do you mean by this observance?' you shall say, 'It is the passover sacrifice to the LORD, for he passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt, when he struck down the Egyptians but spared our houses.'" (Exodus 12.26) the memory is retained in the practice of repetition. But, it is retained in a particular form: not as the melancholic reliving of the trauma of slavery, but as the perpetual announcement of liberation. The event is repeated, but the “disgrace of Egypt” effaced in the very reenactment.

There is another shift that is named here and it too has to do with food and a different temporal existence. Much like the liturgical practice of Passover is a movement from singularity to repetition – which is its own form of singularity – the shift from manna to the produce of the land is a change from the miraculous, singular, appearance of manna each morning – which is its own form of repetition – to the repeated cycles of agricultural practice. In each case the life of this community is bound up with a certain type of temporal existence. We have two models of time here, two modes of faithful existence. What Derrida says with respect to the spatiality of the desert and the promised land – that they are both aporetic places – applies, it seems to me, temporally as well -- they are both aporetic times. That is, both times -- the time of repetition (which is its own singularity) and the time of sigularity (which is its own repetition) -- are not the coincident with chronological time: the one breaks regular time open in its aleatory irruption, the other exceeds common time in its junction with eternity.

Lenten Reflection 3b: 1 Corinthians 10:1-13 / Messianic Politics iv: Contraction

1 Corinthians 10:1-13
10:1 I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, that our ancestors were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea,
10:2 and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea,
10:3 and all ate the same spiritual food,
10:4 and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ.
10:5 Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them, and they were struck down in the wilderness.
10:6 Now these things occurred as examples for us, so that we might not desire evil as they did.
10:7 Do not become idolaters as some of them did; as it is written, "The people sat down to eat and drink, and they rose up to play."
10:8 We must not indulge in sexual immorality as some of them did, and twenty-three thousand fell in a single day.
10:9 We must not put Christ to the test, as some of them did, and were destroyed by serpents.
10:10 And do not complain as some of them did, and were destroyed by the destroyer.
10:11 These things happened to them to serve as an example, and they were written down to instruct us, on whom the ends of the ages have come.
10:12 So if you think you are standing, watch out that you do not fall.
10:13 No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.

Comment
Paul establishes a relation between Israel of the Mosaic era and the church of the messianic era by way of a bizarre – but not unprecedented – form of interpretation: a typological interpretation (each occurrence of the word “example” [vv. 6 & 11] is a translation of a form of the Greek typos). Agamben is helpful here because he takes seriously Paul’s method in both its historical and normative aspects. He does not shy away in embarrassment from the method, nor does he allow it to evolve into the, now discredited, medieval mode of allegorical interpretation. What he does is examine this relation in terms of its role in shaping messianic temporality – the theme of his book. “What matters to us here,” he says,

Is not the fact that each event of the past – once it becomes figure [typos] – announces a future event and is fulfilled in it, but is the transformation of time implied by the typological relation. The problem here does not simply concern the biunivocal correspondence that binds typos to antitypos together in an exclusively hermeneutic relationship, according to the paradigm that prevailed in medieval culture; rather, it concerns a tension that clasps together and transforms past and future, typos and antitypos, in a inseparable constellation. The messianic is not just one of the two terms in this typological relation, it is the relation itself. This si the meaning of the Pauline expression “for us, upon whom the ends of the ages [aionon, the olamim] are come to face each other.” The two ends of the olam hazzeh and the olam babba contract into each other without coinciding; this face to face, this
contraction, is messianic time, and nothing else. Once again, for Paul, the messianic is not a third eon situated between two times; but rather, it is a caesura that divides the division between times and introduces a remnant, a zone of undecidablity, in which the past is dislocated into the present and the present is extended into the past. (74)

For Agamben Paul’s method does not negate the initial Israelite experience, it does not co-opt it for Christian purposes. Instead Paul discloses something of the structure of messianic time where the past does not relate to the present and the future according to a linear movement, where one event follows another in a determinate manner, “like the beads on a rosary.” The messianic event – which is for Paul, if not for Agamben, the resurrection of Jesus and the calling into existence of the ekklesia under the power of the Holy Spirit – inaugurates a rupture in the structure of time and renders its relationship to itself and our relationship to it substantially different. Agamben sees this realization in Benjamin’s description of messianic time as a “monstrous abbreviation” (as in the epigraph to this blog). Benjamin’s “now time” (Jetztzeit) and Paul’s “present time” (ho nyn kairos) both name, not a moment that follows chronologically from an earlier moment, but the possibility of past and future forming a “constellation” in an unpredictable, revolutionary moment.

Lenten Reflection 3a: Isaiah 55:1-9

Isaiah 55:1-9
55:1 Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.
55:2 Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food.
55:3 Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live. I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David.
55:4 See, I made him a witness to the peoples, a leader and commander for the peoples.
55:5 See, you shall call nations that you do not know, and nations that do not know you shall run to you, because of the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, for he has glorified you.
55:6 Seek the LORD while he may be found, call upon him while he is near;
55:7 let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts; let them return to the LORD, that he may have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.
55:8 For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the LORD.
55:9 For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

Comment
There is a paradigmatic text, which occurs in various forms, that condenses the whole of divine activity into a single formulation:

"The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, yet by no means clearing the guilty, but visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children and the children's children, to the third and the fourth generation." (Exodus 34.6-7)

In a single figure of the divine resides the impulse to mercy and to punishment. The book of Isaiah can be seen as an extended meditation on this tension between retribution and forgiveness. However, in Isaiah it happens in reverse: anger precedes forgiveness – the liturgical formulation, prefers the softer side of God and thus presents it first, warning, nevertheless, that this is not the whole picture. In practice –an intra-textual “practice” – anger comes first, mercy and forgiveness come to substitute for anger. This difference is so apparent in Isaiah that scholars divide the book into two parts: “first Isaiah” where anger and punishment (i.e. exile) takes precedent and “second Isaiah” where mercy reigns. The shift can be seen in the following:

For a brief moment I abandoned you, but with great compassion I will gather you. In overflowing wrath for a moment I hid my face from you, but with everlasting love I will have compassion on you, says the LORD, your Redeemer. This is like the days of Noah to me: Just as I swore that the waters of Noah would never again go over the earth, so I have sworn that I will not be angry with you and will not rebuke you. For the mountains may depart and the hills be removed, but my steadfast love shall not depart from you, and my covenant of peace shall not be removed, says the LORD, who has compassion on you. (Isa 54.7-9)

Today’s text, well into “second Isaiah,” further articulates the compassion that God longs to show to Israel. What is interesting here is the “materialist” cadence. The promise of a new covenant is bound to a new economy. This is an economy that is not administered by (the Babylonian) empire, not ruled by the market, not driven by scarcity: it is an economy of abundance where, like the divine compassion that manifests in rhetorical excesses, the things of human need become, in there excess, the things of human enjoyment: “eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food”. This is an abundance that destroys, in exceeding, a calculable exchange: “you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.” Under the new covenant, a new regime of enjoyment, an abundance dispensed from a source, itself in excess of the calculable: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” This is the utopian hope offered to a people in exile.

Messianic Politics (iii c):Jonah and Justice

On the matter of distinguishing between law and justice, and partially in response to the questions from Steve and Doug, we can look, in more detail, at Scholem's, “On Jonah and Justice”(1919).

Scholem’s very interesting – perhaps even idiosyncratic – reading of Jonah leads him to some striking conclusions on law and justice. He explains that the seemingly exceptional character of the book of Jonah among the prophetic books – its reluctant prophet, its conspicuous lack of prophecy (a single line, Jonah 3.4) – point to its status as a book not primarily of prophecy, but about prophecy: God teaches the prophet what justice is. Justice, on Scholem’s reading of this divine lesson, is precisely the deferment that I mentioned in the earlier post, but in this case, instead of the deferment between commandment and judgment – which, now that I come back to it, is better said to be a constitutive difference, not a provisional or temporal gap – it is the one between judgment and execution.

Scholem pursues the issue of law and justice in Jonah in terms of the two conflicting ways of interpreting the only properly prophetic speech of the book: "Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be [lit. “is being”] overthrown!" (3.4b). Scholem relies upon the literal translation and in this way speaks of Jonah’s interpretation of prophecy as “historiography.” According to the prophecy Ninevah is destroyed – its as though Jonah’s speech is transposed forty days into the future, thus he speaks in the present (participial) tense, as though he were bearing witness to an event under way: Ninevah is being destroyed. (It would be interesting to read Jonah’s “Ninevah is being overthrown” in light of Freud’s take on fantasy in his essay “A Child is Being Beaten” – written, interestingly, in the same year as Scholem’s essay.) Now, according to Jonah, it is simply a matter of history following suit, there is no gap between prophecy and historical fact. For God, on the other hand, prophecy qua prophecy is not historical fact, but warning. The difference between the historiographic and prophetic points of view correspond to the difference between law and justice. As Scholem claims,

Jonah takes the standpoint of the law, and from this side he is indeed in the right; God takes that of justice; God denies the (mythical) law in history. In the act of repentance, the law is overcome and the judgment is not carried out.(On this, compare Psalm 94:14-15, particularly the interconnection of the two verses.) This, and nothing else, is the meaning of justice in the deepest sense: that judgment is allowed, but the execution of it remains something tirely different. The unequivocal connection of the judge's decision to the executive power--a connection that defines the actual order of law--is suspended by the deferment on the part of the executive power. This is what God does with Nineveh. The conclusion of 4:10--he had passed a sentence in order to carry it out, and he did not (yet) do it--is a classic statement of the idea of justice. Where the court pronounces a verdict, justice raises a question. As Daniel says:"In the counsel of the guardians a decree and in the verdict of the holy ones a question"—this is justice (357).

A few of points on this to conclude: (1) justice is not constitutively different from law, but an adjustment of it. Justice, in Scholem’s telling is a disruption of the continuity of law, which is the necessary connection between judgment and execution. Without this connection law is toothless, impotent. Thus, Scholem says, “Justice and the law complement each other and coincide.” Justice relies upon the logic of law – as the continuity between judgment and execution – insofar as it is defined as the disruption of this logic and the breaking of this continuity, as “deferment.” (2) Justice is fundamentally a theological (perhaps, “Jewish”) concept. This is not to say that it harbours no historical or profane exigency –Scholem highlights this exigency when he says that “Justice is the idea of the historical annihilation of divine judgment, and just is that deed which neutralizes divine judgment upon it.” In this way Scholem’s justice, much like Benjamin’s divine violence, is opposed to and resists fate. (3) Justice is associated with the question, law with an answer. The question, as opposed to the verdict, is something like a Benjaminian “unalloyed means.” Subtracted from its relation with an answer, it is a means without and end or a mediality.

The question is an unending cycle; the symbol of this infinitude, in which the possibility of an empirical end is given, is the rhetorical question. This ("Jewish") question can be justly characterized as medial; it knows no answer,which means its answer must in essence be another question; in the innermost basis of Judaism the concept of an answer does not exist (356).

Lenten Reflection 2b: Philippians 3:17-4:1

Philippians 3:17-4:1
3:17 Brothers and sisters, join in imitating me, and observe those who live according to the example you have in us.
3:18 For many live as enemies of the cross of Christ; I have often told you of them, and now I tell you even with tears.
3:19 Their end is destruction; their god is the belly; and their glory is in their shame; their minds are set on earthly things.
3:20 But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.
3:21 He will transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, by the power that also enables him to make all things subject to himself.
4:1 Therefore, my brothers and sisters, whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, my beloved.

Comment
Paul is speaking here of a politics – citizenship is a political category – that is “otherworldly.” But at the very moment when he says that “our citizenship is in heaven,” he limits access to this other world by deferring its arrival: we are still “expecting” the arrival/return of the Messiah. Furthermore, in the next verse he shifts from the present to the future tense: “He will transform…” It is important to keep in mind here that Philippi is a Roman colony and this is not a broad condemnation of worldly political involvement, it is a call for the followers of Jesus to withdraw their loyalty – if not their bodies – from empire.

Paul is speaking here of a biopolitics. Not in terms of the more recent phenomena of governmentality and medicalization that Foucault identified, but in terms of the locus of political struggle being essentially corporal. Both the preset order of the world and the order that is to come concern a bodily disposition. The “enemies of the cross,” as Paul says earlier in the passage, are those who are corporally disposed to the present order alone: “their god is their belly…their minds are set on earthly things.” There is no sign of Gnosticism here: the fault that Paul finds with these enemies is only the lack of a supplement to the immanent arrangement. These bodies of “humiliation” are the bodies that we are, there is no escape from them. But these bodies will “conform,” in the future, to another corporality: they will take the form of “glory.” The glorified body, the body of Christ, the resurrected body that still bears the marks of its permeability, is not completely other than the humiliated body, it is its supplement. There is no room here for a hyper-eschatological escapism: the content of the form of the glorified body is the humiliated body. The passage to redemption is corporal.

Lenten Reflection 2a: Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18

Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18
15:1 After these things the word of the LORD came to Abram in a vision, "Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great."
15:2 But Abram said, "O Lord GOD, what will you give me, for I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?"
15:3 And Abram said, "You have given me no offspring, and so a slave born in my house is to be my heir."
15:4 But the word of the LORD came to him, "This man shall not be your heir; no one but your very own issue shall be your heir."
15:5 He brought him outside and said, "Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them." Then he said to him, "So shall your descendants be."
15:6 And he believed the LORD; and the LORD reckoned it to him as righteousness.
15:7 Then he said to him, "I am the LORD who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to possess."
15:8 But he said, "O Lord GOD, how am I to know that I shall possess it?"
15:9 He said to him, "Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon."
15:10 He brought him all these and cut them in two, laying each half over against the other; but he did not cut the birds in two.
15:11 And when birds of prey came down on the carcasses, Abram drove them away.
15:12 As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and a deep and terrifying darkness descended upon him.
15:17 When the sun had gone down and it was dark, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces.
15:18 On that day the LORD made [literally, ”cut”] a covenant with Abram, saying, "To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates...."

Comment
Apart from containing the Pauline proof text for the possible inclusion of the Gentiles or goyim into the people of God – the faith of Abram that was “credited to him has righteousness” –this text is about the promise of (1) offspring and (2) land; and it is about the making, the cutting, of a covenant. The first promise takes place in the evening (how else could Abram count the stars?); it involves a dialogue between God and Abram; it concerns the material extension of Abram’s seed and it concludes with a word of promise: the deal is sealed with a word made in good faith. The second promise begins in the evening and concludes in the “terrifying darkness” of a deep sleep; it begins with dialogue and concludes with an opaque, nocturnal manifestation of divine presence; it concerns the material territory which Abram’s offspring should populate and the deal is sealed with a covenant, with a highly symbolic ritual which translates a promise in good faith to an externalized and binding obligation – the cutting of the covenant corresponds to the cutting of the animals; the passing of the divine between the cuts obligates, through threat of being cut in half himself, God to follow through.

Lenten Reflection 1b: Romans 10.8b-13

Romans 10:8b-13
10:8b "The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart" (that is, the word of faith that we proclaim);
10:9 because if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.
10:10 For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved.
10:11 The scripture says, "No one who believes in him will be put to shame."
10:12 For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him.
10:13 For, "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved."

Comment
Jacob Taubes makes much of the connection between Paul and Moses: the deepest connection concerns their mutual willingness to be “blotted out” or “accursed,” with respect to God, for the sake of the people of Israel (Moses in order that God not destroy them after the golden calf incident, Paul in order that God would save more than a remnant). Here is another example of a Pauline repetition of Moses. Paul reads Deut 30 and inserts “faith” where Moses says “commandment,” turning Moses’ assurance to Israel of the closeness of the law into the Gentile’s immanent potential for salvation. (It is only a hermeneutical depravity that would read v.9 as an isolatable formula for salvation.) The demands of the law are not as much mitigated as displaced. The fact that, as Paul says earlier in the chapter, “Christ is the telos of the law,” should not be read only as cessation, but also as a fulfillment. Agamben takes the ambiguity of telos as the key to the Pauline reading of the law; as a kind of fulfillment in cessation.

The political significance of confession should also not be missed. Paul rereads Jewish law in light of its messianic transformation and, in this same gesture, undermines Roman law. To name as sovereign anyone other than Caesar would be treasonous; especially a Jewish peasant whom this same empire had executed. (Jesus would, in this way, fulfill the political function of the empty signifier as Laclau understands it: as that signifier which “empties itself” [cf. Phil 2.7] of content, or dies, in order that disparate demands and desires cohere – i.e. become universal – under a particular name.) In the text of Deuteronomy that Paul is glossing, the exhortation to keep the law turns quickly to the prohibition of idolatry: “But if your heart turns away and you do not hear, but are led astray to bow down to other gods and serve them, I declare to you today that you shall perish”. Turning to law is also a turning away from idolatry – an idolatry exemplified in the religious practices of the Canaanites. The turning to faith carries over this prohibition of idolatry – exemplified in the theologico-political practices of the Romans.

Lenten Reflection 1a: Deut 26.1-11

In an effort at Lenten discipline I have decided to try to offer reflections on the readings from the revised common lectionary. I have attempted this for several years in a row and rarely make it past the second Sunday in Lent. We'll see what happens this year.

Deuteronomy 26:1-11
26:1 When you have come into the land that the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance to possess, and you possess it, and settle in it,
26:2 you shall take some of the first of all the fruit of the ground, which you harvest from the land that the LORD your God is giving you, and you shall put it in a basket and go to the place that the LORD your God will choose as a dwelling for his name.
26:3 You shall go to the priest who is in office at that time, and say to him, "Today I declare to the LORD your God that I have come into the land that the LORD swore to our ancestors to give us."
26:4 When the priest takes the basket from your hand and sets it down before the altar of the LORD your God,
26:5 you shall make this response before the LORD your God: "A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous.
26:6 When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us,
26:7 we cried to the LORD, the God of our ancestors; the LORD heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression.
26:8 The LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders;
26:9 and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.
26:10 So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O LORD, have given me." You shall set it down before the LORD your God and bow down before the LORD your God.
26:11 Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the LORD your God has given to you and to your house.

Comment
1.The first thing: abundance is not something to be spurned or denounced, but received and used in a certain way – abundance is a gift. The abundance that Israel experiences in Canaan is an inheritance, a gift from God; not a gift received in symmetry to an act – like produce to labour – but a gift that exceeds calculable reciprocity. There is a proportionality characteristic of covenant: an act of faithfulness was required of each party – this is the fundamental nature of a covenant (theological or juridical). However, this is a radically disproportionate proportionality. Israel’s obedience to the word of God, as difficult as it is, does not approximate the gift that is received in return: a new life in a new land as a great nation.

2. In order that historical memory not fail and the gratuitousness of a gift not be confused with what is due, a liturgical act is instituted. In this act the economy of the gift is continued: Israel gives back to God. In this gesture the excess of God’s initial gift is symbolically reciprocated: the first fruits are given. Before Israel can enjoy the produce of the land they must sacrifice it; offer it up to the one who has given it to them. Materially the sacrifice does not diminish the abundance, enjoyment is allowed, even if it is deferred. The scriptural significance of offering what is first has a precedent in the story of Cain and Abel (Gen. 4). It seems that the preference God shows to Abel has to do with the fact that he offered the “firstlings of his flock” (v.4) while Cain simply brought “an offering of the fruit of the ground” (v.3). Cain did not offer the premier fruit, his offering was not primordial or originary enough – the exigency of “fundamental ontology”—the demand for the more originary – is here prefigured as a theological exigency (is ontotheology overcome?)

3. The instituted liturgical act is fundamentally a repetition. It is the perpetual reiteration of the founding gesture of divine gift – as an exodus from Egypt (and a violence inflicted) and an entrance into the land of the Canaanites (and a violence inflicted) – in the form of autobiography or etiology: “a wandering Aramean was my ancestor…” Israel lives the new as the constant iteration of the old. Life in Canaan is a double life: it is lived in both the promised land and the desert at the same time. The comfort and abundance of life in the promised land is perforated by the memory of the privation of the desert – perhaps this is why Derrida calls both the desert and the promised land “aporetic places.”

4. The identity of this people does not coincide with itself. First of all Israel qua Israel is only constituted in this liturgical repetition. It is this practice that prevents the people of God from becoming “like the other nations.” This will be the recurring problem for Israel in Canaan, primarily in terms of its desire for a King (cf. Deut 17.14). Israel is distinguished from the Canaanites not by virtue of ethnicity but by way of its relation to it itself by way of its relation to God. Second, the story that is repeated – “a wandering Aramean…” – points to a heterogeneous origin in terms of ethnicity, but more importantly in terms of the indefiniteness of wandering. Finally, even Israel present in the land, bound together through a collective subjectivation, is not permitted to settle into a fixed identity: the “alien among you” will be a full participant in the liturgical life of this people – and in this way be an originary “member” of the community.