Secular Messiahs and the Return of Paul’s 'Real'

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-vii

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Concetta V. Principe

   Pages 1-13

3. The Trauma of Secularism

   • Concetta V. Principe

   Pages 15-51

4. Messianic Roads and Highways: From Paul’s Weakness to Benjamin’s Weak

   • Concetta V. Principe

   Pages 53-81

5. Paul and the Law: Love, Circumcision, and the Death of Sin

   • Concetta V. Principe

   Pages 83-111

6. Interpellation Beyond Interpellation

   • Concetta V. Principe

   Pages 113-147

7. The Messianic Exceptions

   • Concetta V. Principe

   Pages 149-182

8. Conclusion

   • Concetta V. Principe

   Pages 183-193

9. Back Matter

   Pages 195-245

   PDF

This project engages with scholarship on Paul by philosophers, psychoanalysts, and historians to reveal the assumptions and prejudices that determine the messiah in secularism and its association with the exception.

• Lacanian psychoanalysis
• the 'real'
• Pauline Studies
• messianism
• secularism
• political theology
• i ek
• Badiou
• philosophy
• prejudice
• theology

“Secular Messiahs and the Return of Paul’s ‘Real’: A Lacanian Approach is, to conclude, a worthwhile read and deserves a place in the expanding field of Pauline studies. Principe has done us a favor by pulling together many strands of the scholarship and presenting them in a unified manner based upon a Lacanian reading.” (Thomas C. Edmondson, Reading Religion, readingreligion.org, July, 2017) 

"In addition to its superb treatment of contemporary philosophy and cultural theory, Principe engages with a rich array of early Jewish texts with a breadth and sophistication which distinguishes it from almost everyone else writing about these issues to date. Principe is clearly a thinker of crucial importance, and her work on Paul as a figure of trauma within secularism and universalism will be recognized as having far reaching implications.' - Ward Blanton, University of Kent, UK

'This is a very impressive book that links Lacan to the focus on contemporary messianism and shows how modern secularism repeats Paul's original experience. To read the messiah as an objet petit a is a brilliant move where the messiah is seen as a symptom of the real in secularism. Principe sheds a great deal of light on contemporary messianism in philosophy and our understanding of who Paul was.' - Clayton Crockett, University of Central Arkansas, USA

"Principe takes us on a tour of the uncomfortable encounter with the Real of the project of secularization, a Real that according to her discussion is connected to the Pauline formulation of the events of the crucifixion and reincarnation of Christ. In her unique use of the psychoanalytic orientation, she does not fall into the traditional traps of an innocent affirmation of the events nor of the symbolic-philosophical abstraction of them, but recognizes them as the foundation of the Western unconscious." - Itzhak Benyamini, author of Narcissist Universalism: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Paul's Epistles

Concetta V. Principe takes a Lacanian psychoanalytic approach to comparative explorations of twentieth-century texts. Her articles exploring trauma in cultural and political texts have appeared in Journal of Cultural Research and Interdisciplinary Literary Studies: A Journal of Criticism and Theory. She currently teaches at York University, Canada.

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