Conclusion

Paul is a figure through whom Jacob Taubes can discern his true disagreement with his intellectual opponents, such as Friedrich Nietzsche. The Pauline epistles provide some perspectives for Taubes to reconsider the Christian culture that shaped his identity as a German-speaking Jew in a post-Holocaust Europe. These texts are useful for this particular reader to reconsider history without ever fully separating it from philosophy. The contemporary philosophical turn to Paul, considered by taking Taubes as its prime example, can partly be explained by these philosophers’ (Taubes, Badiou, Agamben, Žižek) attraction to Paul as an antinomian figure, a figure of lawlessness and freedom from law that can lead to apocalyptic violence (for Taubes) or pave the way for an existential and political break with the domain of law, as in the philosophies of Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. While these two continental philosophers draw upon other readings of the apostle than Taubes’s, Giorgio Agamben bases his readings of Paul on several aspects in Taubes’s works. Nonetheless, the call from Taubes to reinterpret Paul through Freud and Nietzsche is more consistently followed in the recent work of Ward Blanton.