I'll just repeat this quote from a previous thread.....
http://www.pcnbritain.org.uk/blog/post/ ... _that_diesOne of the key problems that Paul wrestles with is the relationship between sin and the law. In Romans 7, he writes that sin seizes its chance in the commandment, and his awareness of the intermingling of the law and the desire to transgress the law prefigures the psychoanalytic insight that the law operates not only at the level of the letter of the law but also according to its ‘obscene superego supplement’. This is the law’s inherent injunction. It’s a level of implicit rather than explicit discourse that is obscene in its contradiction or transgression of the public text of the law, supplementary because it is this injunction that is what binds the subject to the law, and superegotistical because it takes the form of an injunction to enjoy.
This is why, during the first session of talks at The Idolatry of God retreat, Peter Rollins identified the fall narrative as a key for understanding his wider theological project, presenting the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden as an account of humanity’s existential situation as a creature caught between the law and the law’s inherent injunction for us to transgress the law. No wonder that, in what Žižek calls our ‘postmodern world of ordained transgression’, philosophers like Alain Badiou claim that Saint Paul is our contemporary and that his letters should not fail to resonate with us today. For, as any parent will know, it is often the prohibition itself that creates an excessive desire for that which is prohibited.
Having identified the destructive relationship between sin and the commandment, between law and the implicit injunction to transgress the law, Paul then advocates ‘dying to the law’. For Paul, Life and Death designate alternative subjective paths or dispositions that divide every subject between the thought of the Flesh, which is Death, and the thought of the Spirit, which is Life. While the thought of the Flesh is governed by the Law, the thought of the Spirit is itself dead to the Law and lives instead the life of Love.
Katherine Sarah Moody