Pauline Ugliness

In recent decades Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Zizek have shown the centrality of Paul to western political and philosophical thought and made the Apostle a central figure in left-wing discourses far removed from traditional theological circles. Yet the recovery of Paul beyond Christian theology owes a great deal to the writings of the Jewish rabbi and philosopher Jacob Taubes (1923-1987). Pauline Ugliness shows how Paul became an effective tool for Taubes to position himself within European philosophical debates of the twentieth century. Drawing on Nietzsche s polemical readings of the ancient apostle as well as Freud s psychoanalysis, Taubes developed an imaginative and distinct account of political theology in confrontations with Carl Schmitt, Theodor Adorno, Hans Blumenberg, and others. In a powerful reconsideration of the apostle, Taubes contested the conventional understanding of Paul as 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 was, on the contrary, able to emphasize Paul s Jewishness as well as the political explosiveness of his revolutionary doctrine of the cross.This book establishes Taubes s account of Paul as a turning point in the development of political theology. L land shows how Taubes identified the Pauline movement as the birth of a politics of ugliness, the invention of a revolutionary criticism of the beautiful culture of the powerful that sides instead with the oppressed.