The Merchant of Venice and St. Paul’s Political Theology

Abstract

This paper was written with the recent interest of political philosophers, Alain Badiou and Georgio Agamben who called back St. Paul as revolutionary thinker providing the new possibility in the interrogation of alternatives to the crucial issues of contemporary politics. Besides, it was set down with an awareness that Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, though the literary representation of the conflict between the Christian and the Jew in Shakespeare times, needs to be reinterpreted to understand the incessantly repetitive religious dissension and violence even in the contemporary global world and to contrive the ethical practice in resistance to it. Badiou, in Saint Paul-The Foundation of Universalism, tries to attest the subject’s pursuit of the truth termed as ‘universal singularity’, severing from both the abstract homogeneity of the capital and the relativism of the fragmentation into closed identities. Agamben, in The Time That Remains-A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, regarding Paul’s ‘remaining time’ as messianic times, remarks on the ‘remnant’, the existence like the non-non-Jews who cannot be defined either as the Jews or as the non-Jews. The ‘remnant’ represent the impossibility of the Jews and the non-Jews to coincide with themselves; they are beings like the remnant between every people and itself, between every identity and itself. Badiou and Agamben’s understanding of the subject and the community has in common with Paul’s consideration of them as shown in Paul’s argument on the question of ‘circumcision’. Paul emphasizes the circumcision of the heart instead of the circumcision of the body which was used to divide the non-Jews from the Jews as grasped doctrinally, against the Jew-Christians who persisted in the traditional law of physical circumcision and insisted the circumcision of the body on the side of non-Jews. This circumcision reveals in various forms connoting several indications in The Merchant of Venice, starting with the contract between Shylock and Antonio, that is, Shylock’s cutting away of Antonio’s flesh as Antonio fails to pay back three thousand ducats within three months. But most of all, The Merchant of Venice has fruitful meaning as illuminated from the perspective of Paul’s circumcision of the heart, especially in relation with the implication of Antonio’s melancholy, his following masochism, and Shylock’s conversion into the Christian at the ending scene of the court.