... ainda com o texto do mcnulty

"The taboo is a reminder that the encounter with the Other causes the subject to lose some part of himself, the attribution of the name causing something of his being to fall under erasure."

"Dos mortos que dão força à terra,
O que sabemos da parte que aí tiveram?
De há muito este é o seu modo
De selar com selo o barro.

Agora apenas se pergunta: apraze-lhes fazê-lo?
Serão estes frutos obra de escravos envergados,
Não são bolas lançadas até nós, os senhores?

Ou serão eles os senhores que dormem nas raízes
E nos concedem, de sua abundância,
Este dom híbrido de força muda e beijos?"

Elegias a Duíno, 14, Rainer Maria Rilke.

"Yet, the two episodes are almost diametrically opposed in their subjective and hermeneutic implications. In Jacob's story, the renaming that follows the struggle gave birth to the nation of Israel, a name that is tradicionally interpreted as either "the one who strives wkith God" or "God strives". Their struggle results in a mutual wounding, in which each strives against and marks the other without managing to prevail over him. Their parting at dawn is really a kind of "mutual non-agression treaty", in which blessings are exchanged as part of a pact. But it kis significant that the story Levinas reads as an allegory of the transmission of the law also produces a law: one of the hukkin, or "unjustifiable laws", concerning the taboo against eating the sciatic muscle of the hip, where Jacob is marked by his opponent. In this sense it also concerns the dangers inherent in tying to "digest" the law, to presume to internalize its spirit. What the story of Jacob tells us is that the Other, and even the traces it leaves on the subject's flesh, cannot be digested ou sublated. The taboo is a reminder that the encounter with the Other causes the subject to lose some part of himself, the attribution of the name causing something of his being to fall under erasure. But in delivering the wound, the Angel is also checked, and so made to confess its limitations. Although it is customary to read the Jacob's story as an allegory os castration, what is not always appreciated is that it is not only Jacob who is castrated, but God as well; the result of the contest is a mutual cheking, a mutual castration.

The scene of Paul's conversion both recalls and displaces the Genesis story. Paul is stricken with blindness only to be filled with "vision", wounded only to be made whole again. If for Levinas it is Jacob's religion that emerges from the struggle a little bit wounded, here it is Paul's faith that emerges, whole and intact. Whereas Jacob struggles with as opponent who delivers his blessings without revealing his name or his caracter, Paul's revelation is complete. Jesus reveals himself to Paul as the living word of God; the Voice speaks to him and to him alone, calling him into being out of nothingness. As he tells in Corinthians, "by the Grace of God I am what I am" (Cor. 15:10). The vision on the road to Damascus is not the reaffirmation of a existing pact, but a violent rupture. It marks Paul's birth out of Saul'ashes, but it also gives rise to Christianity as a displacement and erasure of the Jewish tradition. It represents the overturning of the struggle implied in Israel's relation to the Law, in which that struggle is put to rest "once and for all" by the advent of the Voice. In the words "Why do you persecute me?" it seems that Paul hears a call to end not only the persecution of the Voice, but also the struggle against it.

Paul's polemic doesn't end there, however. His reading of faith invites not only the "Stalinism" inherent in listening only to the angelism of the Law, but also a turning of that angelism against the Jews. This is why I find it interesting that the Voice that interpellates Paul on the road to Damascus is credited only with one specific enunciation: "why are you persecuting me?" It seems that Paul understands that question, at least initially, as follows: "Why are you, Saul the Jew; persecuting me, the living Voice, the resurrection, with the Law, the dead letter?" But when Paul the Christian invents figural reading, the Voice insists in a new way, in the form of a voice not voiced, with a new question: Why aren't you persecuting the Jews instead of me? Even as it cries out against its own persecution, the Voice demands a sacrifice.

Augustine provides another account of the Jacob story in City of God. There the angel is understood to be Christ himself, who wounds the Jews but spare the Christians. He writes:

This angel obviously presents a type of Christ. For the fact that Jacob "prevailed over" him ( the angel, of course, being a willing loser to symbolize the hidden meaning) represents the Passion of Christ, in which the Jews seemed to prevail over him. And yet Jacob obtained a blessing from the very angel whom he had defeated; thus the giving of the name was the blessing. Now "Israel" means "seeing God"; and the vision of God will be the reward of all the saints at the end of the world. Moreover, the angel also touched the apparent victor on the broad part of his thigh, and thus made him lame. And so the same man, Jacob, was at the same time blessed and lame- blessed in those who among this same people of Israel have believed ion Christ, and crippled in respect of those who do not believe. For the broad part of thigh represents the general mass of race. For in fact it is the majority of that stock that the prophetic statements applies, "They have limped away from their paths".

For Augustine, the Christian is above all the one for whom "wounding" is no longer necessary because Christ "being the willing loser", has assumed the wound himself and thus preempted their wounds. For the Jews, however, the angel of God becomes an avenging angel, the angel of their apocalypse. Those who lack the faith will be wounded, disinherited, and condemned to slavery. This reference to Augustine is not as much of a digression as it may appear. Its proof text is Paul's typological reading of Hagar and Sarah as representative of the distinction between the "Jerusalem of the flesh", in slavery with their children, and the "Jerusalem above", born free through the promise ( Gal. 4:22-31).

It is well know that Paul's reading of the Abraham saga is structured by two oppositions: between slavery and freedom, and between faith and works. But perhaps more fundamental and much less discussed, is the implied opposition between fait and doubt.Consider Paul 'synopsis of Genesis 17, where God promises Abraham that he and his barren wife will have a child through the covenant: "He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead ( for he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah's womb. No distrust mad him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, beeing fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. That is why his faith was "reckoned to him as righteousness" ( Rom. 4:19-22). But in the text of Genesis, Abraham greets God's words very differently: "Abraham fell upon his face and laughed, and said to himself, 'Can a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old?' ( Gen. 17:17). When the same promise is made to Sarah, in the following chapter, the same incredulous laughter erupts once more. While this laughter can be interpreted in many ways, it would be difficult, I think, to read it as an expression of simple faith. Certainly the God of Genesis does not read it that way. Immediately following Sarah's outburst, he says to Abraham: "Why did Sarah laughs, and say, 'Shall I indeed bear a child, now that I am old? Is anything too wonderful for the LORD? At these words, "Sarah denied, saying 'I did not laugh', for she was afraid". To which God replies, "Oh, yes, you did laugh" ( Gen. 18:33-14).

Though God clearly reads the laughter as a sign of doubt or disbelief, it is important that he doesn't punish it. His rebuke os Sarah is more comical than truly stern, anticipating the patience and even fondness with which he will latter entertain Abraham's doubts when he questions the soundness of making the righteous few of Sodom and Gomorrah perish with the sinners. So why, for Paul, must this doubting laughter be foreclosed? Because Abraham's distrust of the word of God introduces the possibility that the Voice itself might be castrated, that in having to pass through the signifier it must necessarily lose something of his power. In this sense, Augustine's characterization of the Jew's lack of belief as a "wound" is a displacement designed to avoid acknowledging doubt- the doubt that points to a wound in God himself.

We are all familiar with Paul' rereading of circumcision as a "circumcision of the heart", in which the cutting of the flesh is replaced by the internal mark of faith ( Rom. 2:25- 29). But how does Paul have to "circumcise" the Hebrew Bible to arrive at his vision of faith? What has to be "cut off" or trimmed away? In my view, it is not only the "letter" of the law, but also the doubt it sustains, that is, whatever undercuts or disbelieves the authority of the Voice. In the Voice that interpellates him on the road to Damascus, Paul hears another question: "Why aren't you persecuting and prosecuting the doubt that stands in the way of love, that doubt that seeks to castrate the Voice?" Perhaps this is what Lyotard means when he writes that "Paul's suffering, his own passion, consists in having to kill the father of his own tradition, or at least in having to pronounce him dead"- that is, in having to kill the doubt that defines Abraham in the Jewish tradition."