Critical Theory and Early Christianity - Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, and Judith Butler - Matthew G. Whitlock

Critical Theory and Early Christianity - Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, and Judith Butler - Matthew G. Whitlock

14. Paul Exposed: Reading Galatians with Judith Butler

Critical Theory and Early Christianity - Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, and Judith Butler - Matthew G. Whitlock

Valérie Nicolet [+-]
Institut protestant de théologie, faculté de Paris
Since 2013, Valérie Nicolet is “maître de conférences” at the Institut protestant de théologie, faculté de Paris, where she teaches New Testament and Ancient Greek. In her research, she focuses on the Pauline letters. At the moment, she is working on the rhetorical construction of the law in Galatians. Her scholarship highlights interdisciplinary approaches, more prominently with philosophy, and recently, with queer theory. She has published a book on the construction of the self in Romans (Constructing the Self: Thinking with Paul and Michel Foucault, Tübingen, Mohr Siebeck, 2012).

Description

This chapter offers an engagement of Judith Butler’s work in Bodies that Matter and, through a reading of Galatians, questions Pauline scholarship in two directions: (1) it proposes a way out of a binary reading of Paul, and (2) it affirms the necessity of a queer critique of readings of Paul. After introducing Butler’s work, it looks at the strategies that Paul uses to produce subject and abject spaces, with a focus on the role of the law in Paul’s rhetoric and the gender boundaries that are drawn by Paul’s rhetoric, particularly in terms of masculinity. The interaction with Butler highlights the fact that approaches which try to figure out whether Paul is progressive or rather conservative do not sufficiently consider the rhetorical and strategic dimensions of his letters.

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Citation

Nicolet, Valérie. 14. Paul Exposed: Reading Galatians with Judith Butler. Critical Theory and Early Christianity - Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, and Judith Butler. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. 314-349 Oct 2022. ISBN 9781781794135. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=30158. Date accessed: 11 Dec 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.30158. Oct 2022

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