"Jean-François Lyotard suggests that Paul interrupts this struggle in his appeal to the mystery of incarnation: ' The Word was made Flesh and came among us: is this not to announce that the Voice voices itself by itself, and to say that it asks not so much to be scrupulously examined, interpreted, understood and acted so as to make justice reign, but love?' The struggle that defines Jewish ethics is thus inverted: it is no longer the "angelism" of the Voice that one must struggle against, but the letter of the Law that limits this euforic insistence. The Voice demands no to be examined and enacted, but "loved".
What, then, is the meaning of "freedom" that Paul proclaims, the freedom revealed to him by the Voice? On the one hand, it involves a freedom from the Law in its proscriptive formulations, on the other, it implies an identification with a principle behind the law that both fulfills it and renders it obsolete. In this regard, Paul is very much an ancestor of Kant, since, as Hannah Arendt observes, "Kant's spirit is the demand that a man... go beyond the mere call of obedience and identify his own will with the principle behind the law- the source from which the law sprang". But they are also radically different, in that for Kant this "principle behind the Law" is practical reason, whereas for Paul it is the authority of the Voice.
In making this distinction, I am borrowing from Juliet Flower MacCannell's work on fascism and the voice of conscience, which is a reading not of Paul, but of Adolf Eichmann. The architect of Hitler's final solution claimed to be guided in his moral conduct by Kant's categorical imperative. Following Harendt, MacCannel suggests that the "principle behind the law" with which Eichmann identified was not practical reason, but the will of the Führer, incarnated in the Voice as object a 1. Flower assimilates his position to the structure of the perversion, which Lacan defines "as a response to the jouissance 2 of the Other as voice, rather than to the Other as speech.". For him, speech is defined as the field of the symbolic pact, "the social contract that divides us from each other as mutual agressors". By contrast, "Voyce is already object a;the embodiment or bearer of a 'principle behind the law'.It took shape in Lacan's discourse as one of the four fundamental objects a ( gaze, voice, breast, feces) around which the fantasy that structures drive circulates".
Speech, as the field of the signifier, works to limit the insistence of jouissance by erecting barriers against it, while the voice as object a is a bearer of the deadly jouissance that insists within the fantasy. Thus, speech as pact protects against not only the aggression of others, but also the aggresion of the voice itself. In the structure of the perversion, the pervert foregoes the protections offered by the law, "identify(ing) himself with the object a in its role as agent of the Jouissance of the Other. In Sade's work, for instance, this identification is evident in the libertine''s attention to the maternal voice, which appears in the form of the uncastrated "voice of Nature" that guides him in his systematic critique of symbolic authority.
In appealing to this argument, I do not mean to imply that Paul is a fascist or a pervert ( although I would not exclude the second possibility, which is arguably the upshot of Nietzsche's notorious psychological study of the apostle). What is striking is that for Paul, nothing comes to limit the authority of the Voice. As Lyotard writes, "Neither Jewish signs nor Greek proofs will be offered. Every intermediary is bypassed. You will hear the incarnation only if the incarnated Voice speaks to you, speaks through you, in you. " Or, as Paul himself puts it in First Corinthians, "What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him', God has revealed to us through the Spirit... and we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom, but taught by the Spirit, interpretting spiritual truth to those who possess the Spirit. The unspiritual man does not receive the gifts of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to Him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual man judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one ( 1. Cor. 2:9-10, 13-15). In Paul's claim that the mystery can only be discerned spiritually, whitout ever passing through speech, we see the insistence of what Levinas calls the "angelism" of the Law, which appeals to a spiritual "principle behind the law" that underlies- but also supercedes- the Law's authority.
What does it mean to say, as it does in the final line of this citation, that the "spiritual man" is "judged by no one?" Of course, the spiritual man is not subject to the judgement of the law, wielded by those wo are "jealous" of the Christian's freedom. But this is not simply a question of "getting off" without judgement because the cost of being judged by no one is to profoundly deliver oneself over to the violence of the Other in the form of the absolute authority of the Voice. And Paul says again and again, "I was freed to the law so that I might become a slave to Christ." And after the event of Damascus, the Acts of Apostles attributes to Jesus the words: "I myself will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name" ( Acts, 9:16). As Slavoj Zizek has argued, the most horrifying, superegoic dimension of God is witnessed not in Judaism, as often maintained, but in Christian love itself. Levina's reading is insightful in that it locates this superegoic quality in the spirit of "angelism"of the Law, which in its very generosity veers in the direction of what he calls "Stalinism".
Amazingly, Paul makes the exposure to this superegoic violence the very basis of ethics, and in so doing identifies not simply a hermeneutic error or a lack of faith, but a several ethical failing or cowardice in the refusal to open onself to the Voice- not just to its love, but to its violence. Perhaps this is what Lacan means when he claims that "Christianity naturally ended up inventing a God such that he is the one who gets off", a God of limitless jouissance. Israel, on the other hand, is not always so eager to surrender to this enjoyment; she has reservations about exposing herself to the "love" of God without protection. In this respect, it is significant that Levinas ' reading of the angelism of the Law appears in a reading of a Talmudic passage concerning the handing down of the law at Sinai, which implies a very different conception of the Voice. In his commentary on the Hebrew decalogue, introduced by the verse "and God spoke all of these words ( all together)""( Exodus, 20:1), the medieval rabbi Rashi suggests that the voice of God took the form of a single terrifying utterance, so unbearable that the people of Israel begged Moses to shield them from God's voice by speaking the commandments for them, mediating its awesome force. This gloss contests the stock reading according to which Judaism is said to be marked by the tragedy of God's absence, his withdrawal from the "dead" letter that signals his retreat from the human community. Rashi makes clear that the Israelite's relation to God is marked by a profound dread of the unmediated divine presence, an insight that casts the stakes of the Jewish law in a different light".
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