Ward Blanton - A Materialism for the Masses: Saint Paul and the Philosophy of Undying Life

A MATERIALISM FOR THE MASSES

INSURRECTIONS: CRITICAL STUDIES IN RELIGION, POLITICS, AND CULTURE

Slavoj iek, Clayton Crockett, Creston Davis, Jeffrey W. Robbins, editors

The intersection of religion, politics, and culture is one of the most discussed areas in theory today. It also has the deepest and most wide-ranging impact on the world. Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture will bring the tools of philosophy and critical theory to the political implications of the religious turn. The series will address a range of religious traditions and political viewpoints in the United States, Europe, and other parts of the world. Without advocating any specific religious or theological stance, the series aims nonetheless to be faithful to the radical emancipatory potential of religion.

After the Death of God, John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo, edited by Jeffrey W. Robbins

The Politics of Postsecular Religion: Mourning Secular Futures, Ananda Abeysekara

Nietzsche and Levinas:After the Death of a Certain God, edited by Jill Stauffer and Bettina Bergo

Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe, Mary-Jane Rubenstein

Religion and the Specter of the West: Sikhism, India, Postcoloniality, and the Politics of Translation, Arvind Mandair

Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction, Catherine Malabou

Anatheism: Returning to God After God, Richard Kearney

Rage and Time: A Psychopolitical Investigation, Peter Sloterdijk

Radical Political Theology: Religion and Politics After Liberalism, Clayton Crockett

Radical Democracy and Political Theology, Jeffrey W. Robbins

Hegel and the Infinite: Religion, Politics, and Dialectic, edited by Slavoj iek, Clayton Crockett, and Creston Davis

What Does a Jew Want? On Binationalism and Other Specters, Udi Aloni

A Radical Philosophy of Saint Paul, Stanislas Breton, edited by Ward Blanton, translated by Joseph N. Ballan

Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx, Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala

Deleuze Beyond Badiou: Ontology, Multiplicity, and Event, Clayton Crockett

Self and Emotional Life: Merging Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience, Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou

The Incident at Antioch: A Tragedy in Three Acts / LIncident dAntioche: Tragdie en trois actes, Alain Badiou, translated by Susan Spitzer

Philosophical Temperaments: From Plato to Foucault, Peter Sloterdijk

To Carl Schmitt: Letters and Reflections, Jacob Taubes, translated by Keith Tribe

Encountering Religion: Responsibility and Criticism After Secularism, Tyler Roberts

Spinoza for Our Time: Politics and Postmodernity, Antonio Negri, translated by William McCuaig

Factory of Strategy: Thirty-three Lessons on Lenin, Antonio Negri, translated by Arianna Bove

Cut of the Real: Subjectivity in Poststructuralism Philosophy, Katerina Kolozova

The Politics of Postsecular Religion: Mourning Secular Futures, Ananda Abeysekara

A MATERIALISM FOR THE MASSES

Saint Paul and the Philosophy of Undying Life

Ward Blanton

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW YORK

For those most sublime and forceful of the Paulinist paradoxes of my life, Sophia and Zoe. When the time is right, little onesand when you are not so littleremember that when we think, love, joke, and incite we reveal the vibrancy of the worlds in which we believe.

But the struggle against Plato, or to express it more plainly and for the masses, the struggle against the Christian-ecclesiastical pressure of millenniafor Christianity is Platonism for the masseshas created in Europe a magnificent tension of spirit such as has never existed on earth before: with so tense a bow one can now shoot for the most distant targets.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

The fact that this materialism of the encounter has been repressed by the philosophical tradition does not mean that it has been neglected by it: it was too dangerous for that. Thus it was very early on interpreted, repressed and perverted into an idealism of freedom. If Epicurus atoms, raining down parallel to each other in the void, encounter one another, it is in order to bring out, in the guise of the swerve caused by the clinamen, the existence of human freedom even in the world of necessity. Obviously, producing this misreading, which is not innocent, suffices to preclude any other reading of the repressed tradition that I am calling the materialism of the encounter: whenever one sets out from this misreading, idealist interpretations carry the day, whether what is in question is just the clinamen or all of Lucretius, as well as Machiavelli, Spinoza and Hobbes, the Rousseau of the second Discourse, Marx and even Heidegger (to the extent that Heidegger touched on this theme). What triumphs in these interpretations is a certain conception of philosophy and the history that we can, with Heidegger, call Western, because it has presided over our destiny since the Greeks; and also logocentric, because it identifies philosophy with a function of Logos charged with thinking the priority of Meaning over all reality. To free the materialism of the encounter from this repression; to discover, if possible, its implications for both philosophy and materialism; and to ascertain its hidden effects wherever they are silently at worksuch is the task that I have set myself here.

Louis Althusser, An Underground Current of Materialism

CONTENTS

Industrial factories used the body, forcing it to leave the soul outside the assembly line, so that the worker looked like a soulless body. The immaterial factory asks instead to place our very souls at its disposal: intelligence, sensibility, creativity and language.

Franco Berardi, The Soul at Work

Resurrected as a spiritual body (sma pneumatikon)