et encore....

In his provocative essay "The sacrifice of sacrifice", Frank Wande Veire notes that one of the core innovations of early Judaism was the shift from ritual human sacrifice to law-based observance, the biblical proof text of which is God's intercession on behalf of Isaac at the moment when Abrahaam preçpares to slit his son's throat. Vande Veires argues that the corollary of this shift is the fact that is no longer possible to manage divine terror: God can no lonbger be seduced or appeased with gifts. The result is a "spiritualization" of sacrifice, which now takes the form of unconditional respect for the Law. In this sense, the non-sacrifice of Isaac corresponds to a demand for a entirely uneconomic, unconditional sacrifice, one that can be required at any moment, without advance warning. As an example, he ckigtes the infamous episode from the Book of Exodus, where God, after having called Moises to be his prophet, suddendly decides to kill him. Moses is saved only by the ingenious ruse of Zipporah, who quickly circumcises their infant son and touches the bloody foreskin to Mose's feet, effectively circumcising him and so warding off the demonic attack ( Exod. 4:24, 26). Veire interprets this impromptu circumcision to be a reminder that God can at any time impose his insatiable demands. In this reading, the act of circumcision is not so much a protection against divine terror as an extension of it, a mark of the Israelite's profound subjection to the destructive force of divine wrath.

I would interpret this episode differently, however. For me, this passage best expresses the srakes of circumcision in the Jewish tradition, in which it appears as a barrier against the deity that is intimately related to the function of speech as a limit against the Voice. The act of circumcision is not just a submission to the deity's exorbitant demands, but a talismanic protection against them. It is a purely symbolic sacrifice- and ultimately a rather modest one- that serves to ward off something much more radical. Having verified Mose's circumcision, God is no longer at liberty to strike against the mere mortal who stands helpless before him; he cannot further demand a arm, a leg, and so on. As the act that seals the covenant with God, circumcision is not only a demand imposed from without, but a pact. Most obviously, it is a mark of election that identifies the subject of the covenant as under God's protection, but more importantly, it is an act that protects its subject against the unmediated wrath of God himself. Israel's covenant with God is mutually binding contract, one that commits both parties to certain obligations with respect to one another ( although there is n o denying, as Veire quire rightly observes, that those obligations are asymetrical , and that God has a fairly-open-ended time frame in which to make good on his promises). In this sense, the law limits the satisfaction not only of the subject who submits to it, but also of deity himself.

In the epistle to the Romans, Paul argues that to live under the law is to live with the impossibility of ever fulfilling the law, since lone would have to fulfill its precepts in their entirety, something the flesh can never achieve ( Gal. 3:10). It is true that the Jewish Law cannot be "fulfilled", but to the extent that one lives within its confines, it nonetheless functions as a protective barrier against something that is considerably more difficult to live with- the limitless jouissance of the Other. Lacan says of the Ten commandments that "whether or not to we obey them, we still cannot help hearing them- in ther indestructible character they prove to be very laws of speech". This is because "the condition sine qua non of speech" is the "distance between the subject and Das Ding, the deadly jouissance that represents the ultimate "fulfillement" of the subject, its annihilation or absorption by the superegoic Other. In contrast, consider the notion os "sinning in the heart" elaborated in Jesus's Sermon on the Mount, which holds that to think lustful thoughgts about a woman other than one's wife is already to commit adultery, even in the absence of an adulterous act. By this logic, it is no longer possible to fulfill the Law simply by not transgressing it or by avoiding the object it deskignates as abject. As a result, the Law loses its function as a protective barrier.

The difference between the two ethics can best be illustrated by reference to the commandment against lying, or "bearing false witness". Lacan suggests that this may be the cruelest commandment of all because the subject is inseparable from the ability to lie. But if there is a commandment against lying, it is because, in the context of Hebraic law, it is possible to lie; in Judaism there is no supposition of divine omniscience. Conversely, when Jesus introduces the notion of sinning in the heart, and thus the transparency of the heart to God, he suggests that it is no longer possible to lie. In this process, he lifts the barrier against the deity that is so central to Judaism. In this vein, the glospel of John famously asserts that Christ "dwells in us". While Christian doctrine tends to emphasize the positive side lof this cohabitation( the Christian is not alone, is redeemed from his fallen state, and so on), it also introduces as ominous new possibility, one markedly absent in Judaism: the subject's radical exposure to invasion by the deity. In this sense, the psychotic Doctor Schreber's fantasy of being anally raped by God is not so much a delusional departure from the logic of the Christianity as an intuition of the superegoic violence implicit in the intimate relationship between God and man.

According to Badiou, the message of Paul's Gospel is that "we can overcome our impotence, and rediscover what the law has separated us from". This reading posits the Jewish law as one in which the subject is impotent with respect to the all-powerful Other. But what it does not acknowledge is that this impotence is itself a kind of potency in that it carves out a space in which the subject can live by limiting the Other and thus rendering it impotent. In other words, what the Jewish law has "separated us from" is not merely the object that would complete or fulfill us, but the superegoic jouissance of the Other. Paul's treatment of the law casts a new light on the problem of the pact as a protection against this violence. In this sense he is very much the heir of Jesus, who çpresents himself as the one who violently breaks apart all pacts, separating brother from sister and father from son. As he says in the gosçpel of Mattews, "I have not come to bring peace, but sword" ( Mat. 10:34). The stakes of this position become clear in Paul's reversal of the attitude toward the law implied in Jacob's struggle with the Angel, a reversal whose implications are far reaching and sometimes contradictory. This struggle seems to be already implied or encrypted in the even t of Damascus, as a heritage it both alludes to and displaces. On the road to Damascus, Paul, like Jacob, is waylaid by the Angel of the Lord. Both men are travelling alone in anticipation of a possible confrontation: Jacob with his brother Esau, Paul with the Christian converts of Damascus. In both cases, the divine intervention results in a wound: Jacob is made lame, and Paul is temporarily blinded. Both men are renamed, and both events result in new covenants: the naming of Israel as the heir to Abraham's promise and the "new alliance" with the Gentiles that will become Paul's special mission.

... a continuar.