Pauline Ugliness

Paul has been rediscovered outside of the apostle’s traditional religious reading circles, particularly among radical leftist philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Žižek. This is the first book to historically and philosophically situate the forerunner of this recent philosophical turn to Paul, the Jewish rabbi and philosopher Jacob Taubes (1923–1987). Paul becomes an effective tool for Taubes to position himself within European philosophical debates of the twentieth century, a position he gains through Nietzsche’s polemical readings of the ancient apostle as well as through Freud’s psychoanalysis. Taubes performs a powerful deconstruction of dominant conceptions of the apostle, such as the view that Paul is the first Christian who broke definitively with Judaism and drained Christianity of its political potential. As a Jewish rabbi steeped in a philosophical tradition marked by European Christianity, Taubes is able to emphasize Paul’s Jewishness as well as the political explosiveness of the apostle’s revolutionary doctrine of the cross. For Taubes, the Pauline movement was the birth of a politics of ugliness, the invention of a revolutionary notion trenchantly critical of the “beautiful” culture of the powerful, a movement which sides definitively with the oppressed—the “crucified”—against the strong. Building on Nietzsche’s and Taubes’s insights, Løland suggests future directions that readings of Paul the apostle might lead in light of recent biblical scholarship on Paul and current discussions of the Pauline epistles within reading circles of the continental philosophers.