Just as Then, So Now: The Slave as Constitutive of the Pauline Symbolic Order

The letters of the apostle Paul have enjoyed an unusually exalted status in both secular philosophical and theological projects of universalism of recent decades, which have argued that Paul's decisive move in the establishment of early Christianity is his negation of the signifying force and particularism of the flesh in favour of the universalism of the community of spirit. No passage illustrates this aim more plainly than Galatians 3:28, in which Paul states ‘There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.’ Yet, while Paul appears to annihilate the fleshly categories that had hitherto served as the basis of inclusion or exclusion, he turns time and again to the figure of the slave as a fixed point of signification that is seemingly essential to the success of the new symbolic order. Drawing on the work of Michel de Certeau, Elaine Scarry and Page duBois, it becomes clear that it is through technologies of slavery – that is, torture, tattooing, and death – that the figure of the slave functions as an instrument through which to produce an authoritative and totalising ontology out of the new symbolic order by indicating that beyond its limit there lies only annihilating pain and death. The slave thus functions as both point de capiton – Lacan's term for the fixed point that stabilises the symbolic order and renders it legible – and as an ‘oath,’ a mechanism for making language coterminous with truth through threat of violence, as explicated by Giorgio Agamben. Through his maintenance of the figure of the slave, Paul thus forecloses on the possibility of a true universal, finding instead a symbolic order that is made total through force.