Patrick Kéchichian's Saint Paul: A Catholic Literary Critique

Patrick Kéchichian presents and comments on Saint Paul in his book 'Saint Paul' published by Points/Seuil. The work is approached both as a Catholic and as a literary critic, arguing that Paul is the unaesthetic foundation of French literature, influencing writers like Proust, Céline, Bataille, and Faulkner. Kéchichian discusses Paul's paradoxical nature: opposing him mirrors his own persecution of the Church, and attempts to reduce him to a moralizer or a Christian divorced from Jewish roots fail because Paul was a Pharisee and extreme Talmudist, not a master preaching from a podium but a man fallen from a horse, eyes burned by light. The Pauline writings are letters to specific communities, filled with proper names, revealing faces, bodies, and characters. Kéchichian sees not an ideological universal but a universal of hospitality: what is received from the Other is for receiving others. The book includes a preface by Fabrice Hadjadj.