[PT 12.

1 (2011) 11-23] doi:10.1558/poth.v12i1.11

Political Theology (print) ISSN 1462-317X Political Theology (online) ISSN 1473-1719

Doing Justice to Justice: Re-assessing Deconstructive Eschatology Bradley A. Johnson1

Alameda, California baj75@yahoo.com

Abstract
In this essay I critique Jacques Derridas eschatological understanding of justice, by way of an assessment of Theodore Jennings dual reading of the Apostle Paul and Derrida. I take issue with the deconstructive presentation of justice as deferred and/or constitutively incomplete, and instead introduce a conception of Pauline justice that draws from the unlikely source of Jacques Rancire. Here, justice is not so much necessarily deferred by its identification in/as law as it is always and only issued in/as law. Importantly, and in a way I aver to be faithful to the Apostle Paul, the truth of this law (and thus too of justice) is apocalyptic in nature, in that it points to the unveiling of a new creation. I conclude that this secularized, heterodox apocalypse occurs by way of the attention we pay to laws essential and absolute creativity. Keywords: apocalyptic; apostle Paul; Jacques Derrida; Philip Goodchild; Theodore Jennings; justice; Jacques Rancire.

The following essay began as a response to Theodore Jennings politically and theologically provocative book, Reading Derrida/Thinking Paul: On Justice,2 for a panel hosted by the Semiotics and Exegesis section of the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting in Washington, DC. What quickly became apparent, however, was the degree to which my response would inevitably extend beyond a single book. Indeed, one of the crucial values of Jennings book is that it not only showcases his nimble capacity for interpretive fidelity both to the Apostle Paul and Jacques Derrida, but also facilitates a broad biblical and philosophical critique of this fidelity.
1. Bradley A. Johnson recently received his PhD from the University of Glasgow, and is currently independently researching the intersection of aesthetics, politics, and theology. 2. Theodore Jennings, Reading Derrida/Thinking Paul: On Justice (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005).
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On the one hand, Jennings is faithful to the creatively expansive, critical spirit of deconstruction. He realizes, and (as showcased in his earlier works) realized before many of his peers, that deconstruction does far more than free individual texts from their interpretive moorings, and is as such not merely the theoretical justification for an individual critic to be as clever and playful as possible.3 Of course, deconstructions liberation of the canon, and the work from the canon, has not been wholly without merit, no matter what the reactionaries said then and still claim now. But, importantly, neither should one isolate this effect as its primary purpose. Jennings begins by reminding us that the importance of deconstruction has never been primarily to free individual texts from the structures of thought and interpretation that limit what they might or should mean, as significant as this may sometimes be. Its implications, even when the critic is not totally aware of it, are much broader than the specificity of any one text. Consequently, deconstruction is not merely a critical tool or apparatus, and thus is not something strictly external that is brought to bear on a text. Because for Derrida deconstruction is considered an inherent feature of textuality itself, the role of the critic is instead to tease out what is always already happening intrinsically. As a result, while the desire to identify the common-sense individuality of a text (and, thus too, even the absolute singularity of any given critique of that text) is perhaps unavoidable, it is structurally impossible to achieve. This is because every text is always already opened from within by (and to) the untold and unheard layers of its context(s) and interpretive potential. Moreover, deconstruction does not liberate a text so much as it illustrates the very radical nature of a text as already free. It is in this way that Jennings grounds his argument that deconstruction is not and never was confined to a particular literarytheoretical discipline, but in fact has always been an indispensable [ally] for an emancipatory theological project concerned with questions of justice.4 Jennings illustrates this alliance by way of his twin fidelity to the Apostle Paul. By fidelity, I do not mean to say that Jennings interpretation of Paul is normative. On the contrary, he readily admits a certain interpretive violence with regard to, in particular, the Epistle to the Romans. Apropos his appeal to deconstruction, it is not that this violence
3. Throughout most of his major works Jennings is indeed playful with his texts of choice, but his hermeneutical models consistently speak explicitly to specific political concerns concerning, in particular, poverty and sexuality. Representative examples include his The Insurrection of the Crucified: The Gospel of Mark as Theological Manifesto (Chicago: Exploration Press, 2003) and Jacobs Wound: Homoerotic Narrative in the Literature of Ancient Israel (New York: Continuum, 2005). 4. Jennings, Reading Derrida, 179 n. 13.
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is specifically directed at the Epistle; for as we will recall, there is no text, Pauline or otherwise, that can be approached, attacked or praised in contextual and interpretive isolation. The critic, rather, knowingly or not, is always already immersed in the complex discourse built around any specific text, and ultimately does herself a disservice in abstracting out of this discourse the text she is reading. As such, Jennings directs his aim at the traditional and confessional assumptions that have tended to frame the discourse about the Apostle Paul and his most famous epistle. Specifically, he interrogates the interpretive centrality this discourse places on personal righteousness in the Apostles presentation of the gospel, at the tragic and illegitimate expense of social justice. According to Jennings, to privilege righteousness is to fall too completely under the sway of the very same modern conceptions of subjectivity and individuality that the Apostles gospel actually calls into question. While Jennings admits his interpretive assault, he does not concede that such violence is capricious. It is, rather, borne out of his attention and attunement to the tapestry of decisions that have led to what he regards as a dangerous interpretive (as well as ethical-political) hegemony. The result of this hegemony has been a gospel interested primarily in the codification of norms and acceptability, and has resulted in the ghettoization of Christian practice as the (more Augustinian than Pauline) hope for self-redemptive personal/ spiritual righteousness. Importantly, though, Jennings interpretive decision to privilege justice is not a simple or outright rejection of righteousness. On the contrary, he acknowledges that it is impossible to reject righteousness out of hand and still claim interpretive fidelity to the Apostle. True fidelity, instead, is manifest by tracing the logic of righteousness to its inevitable end and breaking pointthat is, to the inherent inability of righteousness to maintain dogmatically its assumed distinctions between true and false, and thus between the saved and the damned. This is to say, Jennings aim is not simply to churn out yet another reading of the Apostle, one that coexists among many other possible readings, but rather to generate a reading that re-examines the foundational assumptions that generate such readings. True to his intended fidelity to the Apostle, Jennings takes special care to show that the interpretive privilege he gives to justice is not an anachronistic imposition. On the contrary, in a surprising sense his argument might even be considered classically exegetical. For indeed, the relationship between law and grace famously outlined in the Epistle to the Romans is neither avoided nor downplayed. According to Jennings, though, the Apostles point is not strictly to identify how the Christ has made the faithful right or true in the eyes of God, and thus the objects of salvation, but instead to present a promise of social justice that is unconcerned
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with (indeed contradictory to the notion of) being made right or true. In this reading of the Apostle, the consequence of grace is a concrete justice that is ever unfolding toward and affirming the otherjustice for all, not spiritual and personal righteousness.5 The difference between righteousness and justice might, at first, appear merely cosmetic. A contemporary analogy may be helpful to see that the distinction at issue is one that makes a significant difference. Consider, for example, one of the most important economic issues facing the globalized economy today: debt. In the event of a crisis, when the credit of a person, company or a country is unmanageably overextended, the normal response is to tweak the existing structure that imposes and enforces repayment. As we have seen in recent events, this tends to occur normally through some kind of legal reform or economic refinancing plan. The upshot is a realignment of ones position with respect to the existing economic and legal structures, not a complete reassessment of the legitimacy of these structures. This tactic is generally comparable to how Jennings sees righteousness functioning in the traditional reading of the Epistle to the Romans. If we were to extend the analogy, justice would then correspond most closely to wholesale, worldwide debt forgiveness. The results of debt forgiveness are, at least in terms of the existing structures of political economy, unthinkable. Indeed, insofar as the results are thought at all, the results may well be catastrophic to these existing structures, what with the probable collapse of present markets, economies and currencies. However, because something like debt forgiveness runs so fundamentally counter to the calculus of value and return provided (or, depending on your perspective, imposed) by the existing political and economic orders, these orders cannot finally be the ultimate criteria for ones judgment and evaluation of what might happen in the event it actually occurs.6 A very similar dynamic is at work with respect to the complex relationship between law and justice, which forms the basis of the connection Jennings draws between the Apostle Paul and Derrida. On the level of popular common sense, law and justice tend to go together. For example, we often use a term such as the criminal justice system to identify a system of legal enforcement. We will claim justice has been served after a verdict, based on existing legal precedents, has been proclaimed. This all-too-easy association is not to be found in either the Apostle or Derrida.
5. Jennings, Reading Derrida, 7. 6. For a classic theological discussion of debt forgiveness, especially in the contest of the Jubilee, see John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus: vicit Agnus noster (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), 2934, 534, 6076, 856.
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On the contrary, Jennings argues, in each we find penetrating critiques of the insufficiency of law that, nevertheless, do not nullify their respective appeals to justice. Indeed, for the Apostle and Derrida alike, law is truly law only insofar that it assumes as a given that which informs and exceeds its own temporal-historical instantiations. Law, in other words, would be an empty declaration, a word from on high with nobody listening, if it did not carry the promise of or appeal to justice. Even so-called relativistic understandings of law, like pragmatism and utilitarianism, ultimately appeal to justice. Where there is no known fixed, objective Good, there remains the possibility (and indeed the inevitability) of an ideologically-assumed and/or imposed common good that forms the basis for juridical decision-making and legislation. The consequence of this is that even legislation later to be regarded as unjustfor example, that supporting slaveryformally made an appeal to justice. The Apostle Paul and Derrida, Jennings argues, are concerned to tease out the inherent problems of all appeals to justicebe they conservative, liberal, or leftistby investigating more closely their relationship with law: that is, the metaphysical status of justice with respect to law, and the ethical imperatives of a law that truly appeals to justice. In short, justice and law are, in Jennings words, embedded in one another.7 One is completely unthinkable without the other. Law calls on/ invokes justice in order to be law, and justice is but an inarticulate idea without content if it is not called on/invoked by law. Inasmuch as justice exceeds law, that is, as that which must be invoked or called forth if law is to be legitimate, it is not (and cannot be) contained by law. Rather, because it is the basis for laws legitimacy, the fullness of justice must in some sense exceed its articulation in law. As such an excess, justice can be said to call into question and destabilize the circumscribing aspirations and tendencies of our existing legal structures, rendering them instead provisional at best. For Derrida, this excess is considered a gift; for the Apostle Paul, it is grace. For the remainder of this essay, I will argue that the Apostles conception of justice-as-grace does not square with Derridas conception of justice-as-gift in crucial ways that Jennings fidelity to both tends to overlook. As we will see, however, I am not interested in pursuing a position wholly contradictory to either Jennings or Derrida. I will, furthermore, seek neither to defend the Apostle from the secularist nor the secularist from the Apostle. Rather, I am concerned to introduce a transformative conception of justice that, while remaining in excess to law, is neither elusive nor in need of the eschaton in order to be fulfilled.
7. Jennings, Reading Derrida, 30.

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For Derrida, justice rendered as a gift is, strictly speaking, impossible. He writes:
For there to be a gift, there must be no reciprocity, return, exchange, countergift, or debt. If the other gives me back or owes me or has to give me back what I give him or her, there will not have been a gift, whether this restitution is immediate or whether it is programmed by a complex calculation of a long-term deferral or diffrance.8

Why, though? What is it about exchange and reciprocity that makes a gift so problematic? He continues:
From the moment the gift would appear as gift, as such, as what it is, in its phenomenon, it sense and essence, it would be engaged in a symbolic, sacrificial, or economic structure that would annul the gift in the ritual circle of the debt.9

For Derrida, the problem is that the very intention of gift-giving results in a payment to oneself. There is, as such, an unavoidable seed of narcissism built into gift-exchange itself, which in turn nullifies the gift as gift.10 Here, just as justice cannot be realized as justice wholly within the confines of law, for it is that to which the law appeals as its justification, but is instead the inevitable excess or exception to laws present, provisional instantiations, the gift, too, remains necessarily elusive to the act of giving.11 Thus we have in a nutshell the logic that forms the quasi-phenomenological pattern for what I have termed here justice-as-gift.12 It is, in large part, a logic that has become all but axiomatic to deconstructionists. Need this be so, though? Is this bracketing of counter-gift and obligation as necessary as Derrida claims? What if it is, in fact, possible to be faithful to the gift, and thus to justice, in the midst of the social economy of exchange and reciprocity?
8. Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. P . Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 12. 9. Ibid., 23. 10. Cf., the gratifying image of goodness or generosity, of the giving-being, who knowing itself to be such, recognizes itself in a circular, specular fashion in a sort of autorecognition, self-approval, and narcissistic gratitude (ibid.). 11. For a full articulation of Derridas deconstructive logic brought to bear on justice in particular, see Force of Law, in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, trans. Mary Quaintance, eds Drucilla Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld and David Gray Carlson (New York: Routledge, 1992), 367. 12. It may be objected that in the term justice-as-gift I am wrongfully fusing two distinct concepts that Derrida employs at different points of his career. I admit they are distinct concepts, and that I am joining them in this essay for rhetorical effect, but am doing so entirely within the structure of the deconstructive logic from which Derrida rarely strays.
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In his masterful work Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety, Philip Goodchild makes a compelling argument that the gift may not be so elusive after all.13 According to Goodchild, the economical logic of the gift, in which every gift comes with strings attached, is illustrative of Western reason following the death of God. Derrida on this point is exactly right: where there is no ultimate, external standard of valuation, gift-exchange is put into a state of flux ruled by complex calculations of investment and return, whereupon every exchange is the passing on of infinite debt. The gift as such, unpolluted by economical reason, would seem, then, to become impossible in the modern age of credit. But, as Goodchild argues, this is true only because economical reason, including that of Derrida, reconstructs the social order in the image of the market.14 To achieve this, social categories such as shame, honour and respect are all compressed into and construed as equal products of exchange. They are, in effect, monetized. One need not revert to a premodern mindset to see the problems with this. The first, most obvious problem is the moral issue of turning the bodies of others into a tradable commodity. The second problem is less obvious, but nevertheless crucial: the ambiguities and complexity of the social conditions and categories of gift-exchange simply do not square with the material flow of gifts with which Derrida concerns himself. Or, as Goodchild writes: social categoriescannot be appropriated or possessed; they are always given. Even in exchange, they do not cancel each other out: honour is cumulative, and may lead to more honours.15 Consequently, in defiance of Derridas own economical reason, Goodchild concludes, wherever there is a perceived inequality in the exchange of these categories, there has been a gift. Goodchild illustrates the complexity of the social conditions of giftexchange, and their incommensurability with economic reason, by appealing first to what he calls the limit case: when, in a gift-exchange, the same gift given is immediately returned to the giver. While nothing material has been distributed, something has indeed been refused, and in the process the giver is potentially slighted, embarrassed or dishonoured. Moreover, consider the ambiguities that attend to a gift-exchange when no comparable gift is returned. On the one hand, via patronage, a giver may show and/or assert superiority by giving, for the one who accepts the gift of patronage accepts his or her subordination and dependence. On the
13. Philip Goodchild, Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety (London: Routledge, 2002). 14. Ibid., 115. 15. Ibid.
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other hand, the one who receives the gift may wish to conceal superiority by graciously receiving without feeling the need to give back in return in this, the gift is allowed to appear as something freely given and not as an exchange, and the giver in turn is honoured. Of course, if the implicit superiority in accepting gifts without giving in return becomes public knowledge, this honour is potentially reversed, for the gift then becomes as a tribute to the one in the position to receive without returning, not a gift. However, to complicate matters still further, if the receivers superiority is not public knowledge, the refusal to return the gift is itself potentially an affront to the giver and a dishonour to the receiver.16 While Goodchilds reflections on the social conditions of gift-exchange do not necessarily contradict Derridas phenomenological critique of the economical obligation or good conscience produced by commodity exchange, we are here introduced to its crucial (though often ignored) supplement. Namely, that our gift-exchange is
always immersed in fields of subjectivity, where thoughts and passions are shaped by dominant strategies of subjectification; we are immersed in fields of signification, where meanings are regulated by hegemonic discourses; and we are immersed in fields of organization, where segments of bodies and materials are distributed through machinic interactions with segments of discourse.17

The crucial deviation between Goodchild and Derridas account, then, is at the immanent level of any exchanges actual occurrence, and thus in the level of attention the former pays to the unavoidable and uncertain interpretations at work in the social bonds that attend to exchange. This is to say, Goodchild argues that while there are insufficiencies built into the economy of gift-exchange, they do not problematize the actual occurrence of the giftthat not having a gift as such does not render it impossible. On the contrary, the temporal, economic order acquires its symbolic meaning and value only when it is considered in terms of the social order in which it takes place. If the economic order cannot constrain the occurrence of the gift, is it then unreasonable that we might find that justice, too, is uncompromised by the homologous economy of law that would appear to undermine itthat, indeed, justice is in some sense borne of law? It is in my estimation that the hope here of a justice that actually occurs is closer to that envisioned by the Apostle Paul, in his understanding of justice-as-grace, than it is to Derridas structurally-deferred justice-asgift. For his part, Jennings comes very close to conceding as much. He is
16. Ibid., 115. 17. Ibid., 159.

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very well aware that the Apostle testifies to an occurrence of justice that Derrida cannot:
Pauls perception that the law is incapable of producing justice depends on the recognition that the messiah of God has been legally condemned and executed by the law. [Whereas] Derridas argument does not rest on the claim about the having come of the messiah but on the thinking through of the claim of law and justice.18

Christ is, rather, the great criminal who exposes the injustice and violence at the heart of the law. The execution of the messiah was, after all, by the book in that it adhered to the existing legal order. Indeed, Jennings continues, it is precisely the legality of the execution that problematizes the laws (broadly conceived) capacity to elicit justice. Thus we have the powerful political significance of the resurrection as conceived by the Apostle, whereby the messiahs defiance of his execution, the authority and sovereignty of law over life (and its ensuing prerogative to sentence death) is interrogated from within. In being subject to law and to its consequences, the Christ exemplifies laws inadequacy to effect the justice to which it appeals. As a result, those who call him Lord become slaves to grace and justice, rather than to death and law. Pauline justice is concerned with the unveiling of a truly new creation: the possibility of life made eternal and eternally new. But as we have seen above with regard to Derridas conception of justice, we need not limit ourselves, as Jennings ultimately does, to economical reason. I would argue that the message one should take from the Apostle is that while law cannot contain or control justice, the occurrence of justice requires the finite and flawed attempts of law to do so. This is, admittedly, a deviation from much of Pauline scholarship, where the promise of the eschaton, and thus of a salvific justice to come, is often unintentionally Derrideanjustice as an infinite affirmation made apparent only in its historical-temporal deferral.19 Here, rather, the occurrence of justice is fully immanent to, but radically different from, the historical and social order of law. For the Apostle Paul, the relationship between law and justice occupies three different, but ultimately interrelated, modes: (1) justice as that to which law appeals; (2) justice as that which law resists; and (3) justice as that which law cannot constrain. In the interrelatedness of its modes, justice-as-grace occurs now as a revelatory apocalyptic intensification of ones present, finite experience in this creation created anew.
18. Jennings, Reading Paul, 64. 19. See, the (always) already/not yet dynamic so prevalent in Pauline studies, which Yoder critiques as perhaps too beholden to an unsubstantiated version of an eschatological Paul set at odds with an apocalyptic Jesus (The Politics of Jesus, 21227).
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The Apostle gives us glimpses of this intensification very early in the Epistle to the Romans. For it is not the hearers of the law who are just before God, he writes, but the doers of the law will be made just. For whenever other nations, who do not have the law, do by nature the things of the law, these, while not having the law, are a law unto themselves (Rom. 2:13-14). Here, Paul identifies the substance of the law as its production; that is, its doing, not its hearing. The law, which in the context of the epistle divides Jews from all others, is thus itself effectively divided. Those who do not have the law are a law unto themselves: they have the law, but this law has no specific content. Paul characterizes them as the doers (hoi poitai). In the new creation effected by the Christ, to know the law cancels the doing, and to do the law cancels the knowing.20 By and by, the law remains, but its relationship to justice is forever changed. Where there is a kind of public judgment at work in law-hearing, which results in boasting, condemnation and death, the future judgment of the law-doer is based on secret thoughts according to the Spirit (Rom. 2:16). This is not to say Paul is indifferent towards deeds. On the contrary, throughout his epistles he takes great pains to explicitly emphasize that the law-doer will be judged by works.21 The added twist, however, is that the works judged emerge from a doing of the law that is itself emptied of the particularity of law. The very futurity of this judgment corresponds directly to my emphasis in this essay on conceptualizing a justice that happens now. To insist that judgment (and thus justice) occurs only in the future, and thus must only ever be deferred, seems to miss the Apostles point, as this implies the existence of some content latent to ones actions (that is, to ones lawdoing) of which they are not (yet) privy. This would be, in effect, to sneak in a law-hearing mentality through the backdoor. In his privileging of the law-doer, the Apostle instead describes a kind of piety that gives attention and honour to that which is already within thought and action (law) but that is incapable of being circumscribed by either. This is, I will suggest below, the beginning of an ethics of thinking that is truly attentive, and in being truly attentive, truly just. We find a decidedly more secular, although for that perhaps no less theological, example of such an attention in Jacques Rancires conception of politics, as discussed in his Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy and
20. These insights into Pauline ethics are indebted to several conversations and a writing project I shared with my colleague James A. Smith. 21. Cf., so that each may receive recompense for what has been done in the body, whether good or evil (2 Cor. 5:10; see also Rom. 14:10; Phil. 1:10, 2:12-13, 3:13-14; 1 Cor. 6:9-10).
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The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible.22 Rancire describes a people who have no proper place in the political community, and who thus lack (that is to say, are denied) the capacity freely and coherently to synthesize and articulate their perspective of the sensual world. Theirs is, in short, the forced evacuation of the Kantian imagination. That is is to say, they play no role or part in giving or taking from the shared world of experience (the sensus communis). In a move analogous to the conception of justice described above, Rancire presents politics as the event when these people nonetheless forcibly partake in that experience, and thus in that community. For Rancire, politics is inseparable from a truly democratic justice, whereby a people create the voice(s) they have been denied all along. In Aristotles ideal political community, Rancire notes that the slave is necessarily different in kind from his master. The soul of the master is one of deliberation and discernment, which gives him the natural right of sovereignty, rule and law. The slave, however, has no such capacity, and indeed has no soul or essence at all. As such, while the slave can understand the reason and law of the master (thus allowing the slave to obey the masters orders), he lacks the capacity or essence to participate in reason and law. They are, rather, imposed upon the slave. Indeed, the slave only has a proper place in the political community at all inasmuch as he obeys his master. His is a place of (natural/essential) subservience, doomed to the anonymity of work and reproduction.23 For Rancire, the proletariat are slaves who have rejected their essential place in the political community, that of the no-place. In other words, they are the slaves who have ceased to be subservient; they have, rather, denounced subservience and have made a claim of freedom. A highly significant dynamic is at work in this claim. On one hand, they effectively position themselves outside of the existing political communitys partitioning of the sensible. On the other hand, they lay claim to a freedom that belongs only to those with a part in this political community. Such is, we recall, the quintessential political event. Notice, though, that the slaves claim to freedom is fundamentally different than that of a claim to wealth or nobility. These claims assert particular qualities as proper and/or essential to those who lay the claim. In terms of Aristotelean justice, such claims are just only inasmuch as the wealthy and noble fulfil the roles they are naturally and essentially capable of fulfilling in the community. A
22. Jacques Rancire, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. J. Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) and The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. G. Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004). 23. Rancire, Politics of Aesthetics, 7.
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slaves claim to freedom, however, is an immediate claim, devoid of any justification by way of their proportional, contributing quality. In such a claim, the slave insists that the correlation between social position or role and natural capacity is purely theatrical, and thus artificial to the core.24 At this point Rancires notion of politics seems inseparable from the non-eschatological conception of justice I have described above. For both the Apostle and Rancire, there is a sense that at the very foundation of common sense or law is a part played by that which cannot be counted or sensed; that justice/politics occurs when this part that is no part asserts itself in such a way as finally to be counted and sensed; and that doing so forces a revaluation of societal roles and norms and judgments. Might we, then, relate this to giving attention and the immanent ethics of thinking introduced above, as that which opens out into the very real, actual occurrence of politics/justice? If so, might this then make possible a truly radical legal and political reform? That is to say, not a reform that emerges teleologically, and thus by way of an appeal to the finality of the True, but through an active ethics of thinking embodied by (the finitude and contingency of) the attention we pay to that which is/those who are constitutively silenced. To achieve this, I conclude that we must move beyond the eschatological, deconstructive or otherwise, rendition of justice. I have hinted at the next step in doing so, but because it requires a more deliberate, sustained reflection, I have hesitated in pursuing it in the present essay. I am referring specifically to apocalypticism. What place, though, does apocalyptic thinking have for our political theology? Would this be an invitation to yet another philosophically fashionable fascism? On the contrary: in the apocalyptic perspective, be it that of the apostle or the philosopher, justice is as always only just beginning, and thus always beginning each time for the first time. There is, thus, nothing to wait for; nothing to defend; nothing to assert. For here the faithful are attuned not to a truth, be it elusive or illusory, but to the creative and ethical activity of a justice that emerges in and as the limitless potential inherent to that which is most finite and fragile.25 Justice, in short, need not be an appeal to, or a promise
24. Cf., There are moments when the community of equals appears as the ultimate underpinning of the distribution of the institutions and obligations that constitute a society; moments when equals declare themselves as such, though aware that they have no fundamental right to do so They thus experience the artificial aspect of their powerin the sense that artifice may mean both something that is not necessary and something that is to be created (Jacques Rancire, On the Shores of Politics, trans. L. Heron [London: Verso, 2007], 91; emphasis in original). 25. Though he resists apocalypticism, this seems very similar to what Giorgio Agamben has in mind when he identifies 1 Cor. 7:29-30 as the most rigorous definition of
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of, a change in reality that comes from beyond existing reality. If we are to do justice to justice, we will allow it to become possibleto become transformative nowthrough our attention to what makes our existing realities most real, the infinite capacity of their finitude, contingency and artifice. Bibliography
Agamben, G. The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. P.Dailey. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. Derrida, J. Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. P . Kamuf. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Force of Law. In Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, trans. M. Quaintance, eds D.Cornell, M. Rosenfeld and D. G. Carlson, 367. New York: Routledge, 1992. Goodchild, P. Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety. London: Routledge, 2002. doi: 10.4324/9780203398418 Jennings, T. The Insurrection of the Crucified: The Gospel of Mark as Theological Manifesto. Chicago: Exploration Press, 2003. Jacobs Wound: Homoerotic Narrative in the Literature of Ancient Israel. New York: Continuum, 2005. Reading Derrida/Thinking Paul: On Justice. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. Rancire, J. Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. J. Rose. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. G. Rockhill. London: Continuum, 2004. On the Shores of Politics, trans L. Heron. London: Verso, 2007. Yoder, J. H. The Politics of Jesus: vicit Agnus nsoter. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994.

messianic life. Agambens translation of this passage illustrates the similarity: But this I say, bretheren, time contracted itself, the rest is, that even those whose having wives may be as not [hos me] having, and those weeping as not weeping, and those rejoicing as not rejoicing, and those buying as not possessing, and those using the world as not using it up. For passing away is the figure of this world. But I wish you to be without care (The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. P . Dailey [Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005], 235).
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