Reading Blindly: Literature, Otherness, and the Possibility of an ...

a response to Caesar's name itself, as Avital Ronell elegantly argues in The Test Drive:

Brutus' role was precisely to bring the caesura to its full potential. If one considers Paul's role from this angle (the bringing to the fullness of potentiality the name of Jesus Christ), then perhaps Saul's betrayal of the Pharisees was only the first moment: in order to complete the movement from Jesus the man to Jesus the universal God (which Judas begins), Paul had to betray Jesus the deity himself. Since only Paul had heard the “voice,” in effect he is now not only Pythia but the Oracle itself (at least in the case of Pythia, there were priests that were translating her words, there were others privy to understanding, interpreting the divine words; in Paul's case, he was both receiver and translator, legislator and executioner). ¹⁰ In order to catholicize Jesus, Paul had to become God himself: in order to create the universal Jesus, what Paul had to first do was totalize the Word, to cement a particular version of the Word, to write out all other versions. Since Paul is the only one who heard the “voice,” whatever he claimed is true, or, more precisely, all of Paul's statements are truth-claims, constative statements: by staking a claim to the “voice” (which no one can dispute, no one else having heard the “voice”), Paul is, in effect, the “voice.” Whether Paul's action was driven by a self-centred motive, a selfish motive (to become an apostle, a specially chosen one, to become the undisputed leader of the Christians, etc.), or whether it was a response to a