RESPONSE NUMBER THIRTEEN To Galatians Re-imagined: Reading with the Eyes of the Vanquished (Fortress 2010) by Brigitte Kahl

KAHL’S INTRODUCTION

In the previous post, I offered comments to Professor Kahl’s presentations under three sub-headings, Galatians and the Occidental Semiotics of Combat, Pauline Binaries Revisited, The Annihilation of the Antinomies (J. Louis Martyn).

The following sub-head is The Politics of the New Creation, wherein the writer asserts (p. 21), that the image of Paul “primeval Christian warrior defending the purity of the Christian gospel against the onslaught of Jewish law and otherness begins to fade.”

I am suspicious of a polemic which acknowledges the complexity of its own perspective(s) while dismissing a counter position, which has been drawn so simplistically it is merely a caricature. 

This gambit is easily done, but is also easily dismissed in its turn as unpersuasive.

The casual dismissal of the traditional perspective on Paul (Paul is contending against those who would require circumcision of Gentiles, who adhere to a belief in Messiah Jesus) is prologue for Kahl, who moves quickly into an explanation of brand new polarities, created by Paul himself.

Kahl is unwilling to place Paul’s polarities on the same plain as the official Roman binary ideology. Nor is Kahl prepared to see these polarities as rhetorical devices merely.

Kahl sweeps all of Paul’s polarities into a pile in the middle of a paragraph, the better to sweep them aside.

Old age-new age, flesh-spirit, slave-freedom, old creation-new creation are Pauline polarities but – according to Kahl – not really. 


These contrary elements, Kahl acknowledges, function in the context of “performance power” but the real game is not Paul’s attempt to adopt a persuasive and familiar rhetoric.

For Kahl, one must come to see Paul’s “war” as actually an “anti-war” in which Paul calls for the mobilization of life’s “losers, the crippled and limping, the never victorious.” The recruitment of bottom rung dwellers amounts (p. 22) to Pauline  “erasures of the principle of enmity itself.”

Paul is challenging, Kahl asserts, “an evil order” and “not an evil Other.”

This is a pretty good rhetorical flourish in its own right.

It may also be reductionist to define Paul’s Galatians letter in this way.

It certainly is a heavy lift to attempt to persuade that Paul has been fundamentally, and indeed deliberately, misunderstood for two thousand years, by a Christianized empire that intends to reassert the old self-versus-other polarity.

The ironic transcendence of all ideologies associated with the message of Jesus followed by a crucifixion of a Jewish messianic figure certainly gains purchase in the imagery of the Gospels, but not, so far as I can tell thus far, in the letter to the Galatians.

Paul in Galatians simply is too angry and hostile for that. Paul in Galatians is strident and accusatory. He is taking on “the Other” because he must answer criticisms leveled against him.

But Kahl would see the author of the Galatians letter as embracing “the Other” – which in turn amounts to an upending of the entire Roman self-versus-other ideology of empire.

Kahl asserts that the abandonment of the old Greek-Roman polarities “does not create a new Christian binary” but rather “produces a non-binary space” wherein “the old cosmos” and “the old-Self” are “put to death and turned into Nothingness.”

Nietzsche saw this in Paul’s teachings, as Kahl again reminds her readers.

This reader responds: is Nietzsche the best you can do? Is a deliberately outrageous iconoclast, given to insults and exaggeration – the best you can do?

Kahl is bumping up against the literal words of the letter and she knows it. This is why she asserts (p. 22), “the transformation Paul perceives is difficult for us to grasp and to articulate.”  Professor Kahl states (p. 23) that Paul’s argument is “literally senseless” if one tries to understand it by “the old ways of meaning.”

Kahl invites readers to look past the words of the letter and focus on lifestyle changes. Kahl speaks (p. 23) of Paul as more interested in “a permanent discipline of self-Othering.” Earlier (p. 22) she had argued that Paul has in the Galatians letter, initiated “the practice of Selves, who no longer try to vanquish their Others.”

The gist of Kahl’s argument at this point (p. 24): “it is not an antagonism between Judaism and Christianity, however, but an antagonism between a messianic way of life and an imperial order.”

A sweeping critique of Christian ideological pretensions can be and has been made in praxis and by apologists over the centuries – along side other far less challenging critiques.

But is the most sweeping critique of all what Paul’s letter to the Galatians is all about?  I retain my doubts.