 Hi everybody. It's nice to see you. It's a real pleasure for me to be here and I'm very appreciative. I'm gonna be really brief and what I want to do is pick up from from the Pasalini link Although I think given the amount of time I have James keeps me on a very short leash these days. The better. He knows me the the shorter. I find that I have to do anything I Wanted to to to to ask about some genealogical questions in part because it's sort of following on what Miles is up to but also, you know, I find myself as somebody really moved and Influenced by by by some of the work of the people in this room actually a lot And I won't try to say it all but I just want to mention Christina's idols of nations Which is such an important step in mapping the history of biblical scholarship in relationship to the question of economy Ditto for Aaron's work on Babylon and also Fatima's Work on the interpretations of Paul as as a way of inventing European man Taylor to you you may hear echoes of some of your stuff Taylor Okay As a sort of cheeky introduction I want to read this only slightly It's by divine gift that I am what I am and this gift hasn't yielded nothing In fact, I've worked harder than anyone Not me but the gift From Jacob Talbis and Georgie Ogamban to Slavoj Zizek in our land by Jew the turn to Paul in continental philosophy Has for these past decades generally presented itself as an important contribution And even as the essential element in a contemporary anti-capitalism I'll return to this and to the vexing question about why this turned to Paul as an anti-capitalist precisely Has like clockwork functioned as a return of anti-Jewish pronouncements, especially in bad you and shizek I don't think so just to be really clunky and blunt about everything on the way I Think this is this is structurally built into the discourses we're inheriting It's precisely when they feel that they want to be anti-capitalist that then they turn to or their Christianity There are sort of self representations by way of these biblical figures become some more anti-Jewish And that's because they're trying to be anti-capitalist and the more that they get into that mode The more they get sucked back into this earlier game. I don't think this is at all accidental For the moment, I want to start instead here with this quote from Paul and the provocative explication What if somehow? Miraculously, perhaps or like a thief in the night Paul as the great protester against the order of work as a means of salvation has somehow Become transformed into the very image of an economy of work without end or perhaps if new forms of work without contract If Paul may be read today as I do here as a new figure of work Without contract then of course the ironies would be striking if the praise of the cessation of work and of the Association of visions of redemption as a cessation of work were to have become instead the very dynamism of ceaseless activity a Kind of crystallization of hyperactive Self-funded overextension of oneself in time and space Then where would we be? What eschaton would have arrived? Second pot-stirring gesture just to be also sort of brutally Concrete is that I want to suggest that we haven't taken seriously the reading of this turn to Paul as part of social movements This is one of the parts of our bigger project that I'm quite keen on And so the mapping of these gestures toward Paul from 1968 to now in relation to actual like social experiments Social movements and so on in which the different authors were participating is something I want to take very seriously and my suggestion is that we have in someone like bad use Paul over time a very strong move From a 1968 story that he's going to tell Actually in the 80s to what he started doing later Hmm in the early 1980s All right Land by Jew was still imagining that his own turn to Paul and that excellent piece of theater the incident at Antioch Indicated his own own exit from a politics of violent takeover this Parisian his Parisian Maoism of the 1970s and This exit it led him into a zone of self-reliant direct action Unconcerned about such violence and the place beautiful, you know perfectly beautiful on this issue the conversion of Paul Is a step away from moving on reliance or it's a move away from reliance on central authorities authorities the play imagines as Involving Jerusalem and so on and and going into a sort of free-wheeling entrepreneurialism in some sense at any rate direct action as the text has it Bad you at the time as I've said it is it's still imagining that this breakthrough this conversion of Paul is About political violence and his own break with an earlier form of political Fantasy which was about violent takeover of central agencies What I'm suggesting here and and and I hope that you might want to push back What I'm suggesting is suggesting is that in keeping with that nice old Marxist adage that sometimes The real revolution were actually in we mistake for an earlier version of this story And in this case what I want to say is that for all of his reliance on Pasalini's Paul which was about the break with fascism right fascism is the problem that Pasalini's Paul is trying to wrestle with But you in the 80s is presenting his work in the same way and what I'm suggesting is that there's another Revolution here's your entrepreneurial neoliberal revolution, which is probably more accurately the way to talk about some of these things in the early 80s And Paul was in this context Sorry, this is by you just a few years ago. He's still talking about these things and this was him at the Hebel theater Where they enacted part of the incident and Antioch and here and in the next slide He's pretending to be he's acting out sort of off the cuff One of the characters in another of his films He's here from Ahmed the philosopher. He is the demon of the city He would hate that we were showing these films at this picture, but he's a big boy Yeah Paul was in the context of this play in the early 80s just remember the slogans Direct action at a distance from the state It was the inauguration Paul's conversion then becomes the inauguration of work not controlled But also not funded by the central agencies of Jerusalem above all it was the emergence of a community and the solidarity only of Faith or trust Meaning that it was a movement entirely self-reliant entirely self-funding Living and dying by its own capacities to motivate itself to enthuse itself and to keep itself Producing and consuming its own market living expressing itself projecting itself as its own market It was the emergence in These respects precisely of what bad you would later formalize in a good sartre in sense as a political subject Entirely subjective or self-reliant Paul by do would soon say was the man for our time as he put it But bad you didn't yet realize it was because his Paul was becoming a perfect icon of a new liberal free market And the entrepreneurialism which is demanded of us all Paul was the man for our time so to speak so hear his voice and perhaps you'll recognize yourself in it There's a lot much longer paper where I did a lot of this preaching. I like to do this, you know, I can't resist it Recognize perhaps not yourself But maybe those most hopeful workaholisms which work through you think of that first Line of Paul that the promise makes you strangely work harder than ever before The real hard work begins once we stop working so to speak according to contract I Have various other things actually and I think I'll skip some of this because It's sort of I do I spend some time in the longer version of this Making the case that you have this sort of hyperactive Paul And I focus on some of my favorite moments I love the bit toward the end of Romans when effectively Paul is saying I'm done You know from Tel Aviv to Ibiza. It is finished You know I'm done preaching and then he's like and I'm coming to you. Sorry. I haven't been there yet I'm gonna get there soon and when I do would you send me further? I mean the guy is like completely manic, right? And there's there's and so I kind of I kind of play this up in the sense that you know consider the historical moment It was a disaster in Jerusalem effectively he has a handful of groups Organized along the coast of you know, what's now Greece and Turkey all of which are understanding him in a different way half of which are totally Moving in directions. He doesn't like just a few lines down when he talks about his collection Which is for him, you know absolutely essential which he's taking for Jerusalem already He's dropping off, you know important congregations because clearly they're not participating with him So, I mean here's here's my Paul. He's manic He's also sort of like really overextended and just kind of hurling himself forward almost in this kind of wacky way And then and also of course there, you know as he sort of concludes that letter Or that section with with real anxieties about what will happen when he finally gets to Jerusalem He doesn't yet know that this is of course going to be a total disaster Okay, instead I Want to say I want to say something very quickly then Actually just in a few minutes I want to make a couple of gestures toward the genealogy that we were talking about around Miles work and so miles is going back to To Shumpeter and I want to mention something about Weber and Zombart If Paul Strangely enough this kind of militant Paul may equally be read, you know, that is to say we could go back and read I mean, I don't talk here at all about Gizek, but you can see the same thing Gizek begins his career and becomes famous and let's also remember that by do you becomes the famous philosopher by way on of some of the of the Paul stuff and And and so, you know, how do we analyze these things? Gizek is in a similar situation and Okay, but what I wanted to suggest is that actually you might have these strange Turnings around a function Precise because of these very old histories that that we're all inheriting here. And so in just a couple of minutes Recall how for Weber Max Weber capitalism is really taking off in someone like Benjamin Franklin Right, so that poster boy of American capitalism who pinches every penny or who finds that saving is a kind of late or gear or priestly service to a sphere divine That is in the language of Weber sociology of religion It's the places where a Christian break with the economy of work and measurable wage Somehow reenters the situation in the form of a strange new Judaism. This is of course all Weber Weber considers the US just such a place remember a kind of amalgam of Christianity and Judaism The spirit of capitalism therefore mixes the openness of the gift, which is also to say the immeasurability of our debt With an intensively bureaucratic or legalistic system of accounting. This is all Weber. I mean it's sort of like Never mind, I won't comment yet In this spirituality as a form of modern economic life The idea is that one relentlessly measures everything squeezing every penny precisely because there is no end to accumulation But what would we do if if we considered Bad use Paul in this respect because they are different, aren't they? I mean just consider what it would mean to replace Benjamin Franklin with Alan bad use Paul in an effort to update the spirit of capitalism What we would have perhaps is much closer precisely to what people like Luke Bultansky or Eve Chapello are Imagining as precisely the new spirit of capitalism They are if I may put it this way describing a bring Benjamin Franklin without job security a Benjamin Franklin where there is even more precarity in the market and when an even more intensive form of self-reliance is Necessary than the one which measures itself in terms of its accounts and its accumulations I think that's I think the difference here if we were to try to update Weber and play around with these Biblical figures in contemporary forms is that we would need to think of I like my Polly's crazier than Benjamin Franklin Benjamin Franklin was an accountant polls not he knows he's not winning right so there's a sense of this unsustainability that I think I like in this in this figure Compared to Franklin, and I think that is something that we see of course in in the work of people like Chapello and Bultansky as they're they're thinking about these things as well in sociological terms Not myself, but the dark gift in me We're more self-reliant more self-funding more precarious in a word more entrepreneurial than ever before Actually, what I'm most keen to do is to stop so that we have time to To discuss these things together, so I hope that's enough to at least sort of suggest where where I was trying to go So thanks