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

way in which he could transubstantiate himself from a Pharisee into the first Christian: the movement from Saul to Paul required a momentary blindness.

There is already a hint of the manner in which the blindness would affect Saul earlier in the passage, when he answers a question (“Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?”) with another question (“Who are you Lord?”). It is not so much that he did not hear the question but that he was able to discern what the “voice” was really asking: the “voice” was not looking for a reason for Saul's persecution (after all, as God, wouldn't (S)he already know why?) but for an acknowledgment that (S)he was God. It was this that Saul recognized in his response; even while he was asking who the voice that was speaking was, he had already acknowledged it as “Lord.” It was through his blindness that Saul could truly see the “will” of “the Just One.”

What draws both Judas and Saul together is the motivation in their actions. One can never really ask what their personal intention is—that is never knowable—but one can posit (or at least hypothesize) the traces that can be found in their actions. Both Judas and Saul betray their existing situations, the result of which is a creation of something new: without their betrayals, the names “Jesus Christ” and “Christian” would not exist. But it is not that their betrayals are in opposition to their situations. What Judas and Saul have done is to be blind to the overt reading of what their situations demand (obey Jesus unquestioningly and be a good Pharisee, respectively) to listen to the secret message that no one else wanted, or perhaps was able, to see, to hear (“Jesus had to die in order to fulfill the prophecy” and “the coming of God was precisely the coming of the Christian,” respectively). When Jesus asks Judas, “Are you betraying the Son of Man with a kiss?” ⁶ it wasn't a questioning of the