Konferensartikel

Throughout (Christian) history; the messianic event has been linked in the imagination to the idea of a consumption – and thus abrogation – of the (Jewish) Law.1 Although there is little scriptural basis for such an opposition; Law has been pit against Grace; Letter against Spirit; and the Jewish God of Judgment against the Christian God of Love. Even in secular Western thought; the pejorative connotations of the Law remain; most markedly in psychoanalytically influenced philosophies such as those of Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva. A similar tendency can also be detected in Alain Badiou’s and Slavoj Žižek’s more recent appraisals of Saint Paul as the founder of a universal gospel of justice and redemption; causing an irreversible rupture with Jewish legalism and particularism. To both philosophers – writing from the re-emerged radical left-wing of European political thought – the apostle’s (alleged) turning against the Law not only reveals the very matrix for every truly emancipatory politics; it also offers an impulse to wrestle free from decades of unfruitful identity politics and localist pragmatism. In line with a significant number of modern European – notably Protestant – theologians; philosophers and biblical scholars; “Law” is once more associated here with restrictive forces which stand in the way of universal human liberation.

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