『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.
Biblical Allusion and Allegory in "The Merchant of Venice"
ERHAPS no other play in the Shakespeare canon has provoked greater controversy regarding its fundamental moral and religious attitudes than has The Merchant of Venice. As everyone knows, acrimonious critical debates have long been waged concerning whether Shakespeare's attitude in the play is humanitarian or antisemitic, whether Shylock is presented as the persecuted hero or as a crude monster and comic butt, whether Antonio and Bassanio are portrayed as worthy Christians or as crass hypocrites. Recently, however, some critics have in part transcended the controversies arising out of the literal story by concentrating upon certain allegorical and symbolic aspects of the play, reflecting in this approach the modern critical emphasis upon Shakespeare's use of Christian themes and imagery and his debt to the medieval tradition. In a most illuminating essay, Nevill Coghill' discusses several of Shakespeare's comedies, including MV, in terms of the medieval comic form described by Dante-a beginning in troubles and a resolution in joy, reflecting the fundamental pattern of human existence in this world. Moreover, he traces in MV the direct influence of the medieval allegorical theme of the "Parliament of Heaven", in which Mercy and Justice, two of the four "daughters of God", argue over the fate of mankind after his fall. In somewhat similar vein, Sir Israel Gollancz2 sees the play as Shakespeare's largely unconscious development of certain myths implicit in the original sources-the myth of the Parliament of Heaven, and the related Redemption myth in which Antonio represents Christ, Shylock, Evil, and Portia, Mercy and Grace. These suggestions shed considerable light upon the trial scene, but they hardly provide a comprehensive account of the entire play.3 The question of the extent and manner in which allegory may organize the total work has yet to be investigated, and constitutes the subject of the present inquiry. The overingenuity and the religious special pleading that has marred some "Christian" criticism of Shakespeare make manifest the need for rigorous standards of evidence and argument in such investigations. The present study does not claim that all of Shakespeare's plays approach as closely as MV appears to
Jet, Rocket, Nuclear, Ion and Electric Propulsion: Theory and Design
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