『베니스의 상인』과 바울이 정치신학
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.
The Problem of the More-than-One: Friendship, Calculation, and Political Association in The Merchant of Venice
If the word “democracy” allies itself or competes with that of aristocracy, it is because of number, of the reference to the required approbation of the greatest number. . . . Must friends be in number? Numerous? In great numbers? How many will there be? At what point do “great numbers” begin? What does “a friend” mean? . . . And what is the relationship between this quantum of friendship and democracy, as the agreement or approbation of number? We are saying here number as the greatest number, to be sure, but in the first place number as the deployment of a countable unity, of the “one more” and of this calculable form of presentable unity, the voice of the subject. —Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship 1
The National PKI of Peru: a new certification hierarchy
In order to guarantee secure transactions through the Internet and to generate strong evidence that could be used in case of future legal disputes, several countries around the world have promoted and regulated the use of digital signatures based on Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). However, despite the high expectations, its implementation has achieved neither the desired results nor its globalization. Many of the reasons were discovered years ago, but they are still open problems for the scientific community nowadays. In order to consider the case of the national PKI of the Peruvian state as empirical evidence for studies that address the open problems, this article describes the details about a new certification hierarchy which is expected to overcome some of its predecessors’ limitations. It is also expected that the information disclosed in this article could be useful to other countries for making a preliminary assessment for possible cross-border recognition of Peruvian digital signatures.