236 EPILOGUE

only against the enemies of the state and applies grace when it comes to
the class of the rulers, against the justice of those deprived of rights. In
The Merchant of Venice the Christian divine law, which is supposed to be
universal, cynically turns into the law of the state of emergency of secular
democracya law that appears as divine intervention against everyone
and everything non-European when needed.
Shakespeare realized that the woman had to meet three necessary conditions: 1. she had to be as much of a woman as possible; 2. she had to act
and speak as a man, and thus by impersonating a man she would become
a man; and 3. she had to act relentlessly against the non-European, that
is she would not appear as a moderating force between the virtues of justice and grace, but rather as an intensifying force of the virtue of Christian
grace, which would become the source of merciless cruelty toward the nonEuropean. While in the Jewish Kabbalah of spheres it is believed that evil
is a consequence of the excessive virtue of justice, in our model Christian
grace materializes as merciless cruelty toward the non-European enemy.
Shylock identifies the root of the problem from the very beginning,
and thus his two actions argue with the ruling European Christianity and
of course with Pauline theology as well, even if unconsciously. Shylock
demands the pound of flesh to be cut off nearest the heart. What does
that act hint at? It hints against Paul, who contended that the bodily circumcision is a mere metaphor and that the real circumcision is in the
heart: a spiritual practice, not a physical one. According to Paul, in spirit
we are all equal before God, as written in the Epistle to the Galatians:
There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is
neither male nor female.1 Shylocks action is to bring the metaphor of the
circumcision which is in the heart back to the concreteness of the body;
he wants to circumcise the Christians heart to remind him of the body
that separates them. Shylocks well-known monologue, which supposedly
presents itself as a repetition of the Pauline text stating that there is no
difference between human beings, is in fact about the inability of the text
about equality to subsist. The text sabotages itself, as Pauline universalism is impossible without profound understanding of identity politics.
Shylock understands that the race of the masters and he himself do not
feel pain in the same manner. They are not cold in the same manner, and
they are not wounded in the same manner. As, during a symposium, a
famous actor once told me, all human beings urinate in the same manner,
1. Galatians 3:28 (King James Bible).

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