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

appropriateness of the gesture: after all, one cannot betray in the absence of love. ⁷ In order for Judas to act in fidelity to the work and life of Jesus, he had to betray him—he had to be blind to the overt teachings, all the laws, and also all the other disciples. In the same way, Saul had to betray the laws of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish laws, and his training and life as a Pharisee in fidelity to this “voice” that no one else could hear.

A similarity can be found in the case of Brutus and Julius Caesar: the betrayal and murder of Caesar had to happen in order to preserve the state; it was Brutus' love for what Caesar worked and stood for that resulted in his having to kill Caesar to prevent him from destroying his own creation. In this sense, both Judas and Brutus betrayed the ones they loved in fidelity to what both Jesus and Caesar, respectively, stood for: Brutus and Judas betrayed Caesar and Jesus for the persons they were becoming, for becoming persons who were other to what they had stood for. Since both betrayals were a response to what the other now stood for, they were a response in fidelity to the other—perhaps an imagined other, a perfected other, a deified other, even, but nonetheless an other—which suggests that the acts were initiated by Jesus and Caesar themselves, almost as if Judas and Brutus were called by Jesus and Caesar to betray the Jesus and Caesar they had become. In Jesus' case, this seems obvious enough: someone had to betray the Son of Man in order that he could be crucified and resurrected. His transfiguration from man to deity required the betrayal; Judas' role was to respond to this call. One could argue that Judas' betrayal of Jesus had to occur; otherwise, Jesus would have become God on earth (after all, he was building a following). In order to prevent that from happening (which would have been Jesus' usurpation of God the father), Judas had to respond to Jesus by betraying him, murdering him. ⁸ In Brutus' case, one can argue that his murder of Caesar was