homme est mort?

Authorship, for example, Pauline authorship of Pauline and Pseudo-Pauline letters, is an idea fostered by Enlightenment notions of the self and Lockean concepts concerning the ownership of property; it is of vital importance for some Christians to believe that the apostle Paul, wrote, for example, Ephesians, because he is the owner of the text, the subject that imparts wisdom, and therefore he owns it, and he belongs to the apostolic tradition and therefore Paul’s writings are inerrant because Paul wrote them (Paul being the subject/author, which Foucault said was “dead”). Why is it important for Paul to be the author? Because of our own concepts of ownership, which remain foreign to the Greco-Roman project of writing, which includes secretaries such as the one Paul uses in his their letter to the Romans.

-- from "Fridays with Foucault" by Rod, at his blog 

Political Jesus:Stromata on Christianity, Politics, Sports, and being so chic and cutting edge

The above is Rod's example of what Michael Foucault meant when he authored the words, “homme est mort.”  This is quite important because Foucault was very much alive when he wrote what he wrote and when somebody else also alive translated that into English as, “man is dead.”

So where does author-ity come from?  And who exactly does a text come from?  Well, you and I are reading all of this, aren't we?  We're participating in meaning, in meaning making, in meaning construction, and in meaning deconstruction, aren't we?  This is some Rod's point, isn't it?  It's one of his points, you see, don't you?

But I want us to step back a bit here.

I'm not going to go all postmodern on you, as one of my blogger friends accused me of doing.  (He meant it not the way I took it -- as a compliment).   I'm also not trying to be difficult, as another of my blogger friends charged me with.  (And he was not trying to be kind).  I am wanting us together to listen.  Listen to what oppressive men write.  Listen to how the oppressed write.  Listen to how you write.  How I write.  Here goes:

To try to pin "authorship" on the likes of Enlightenment men like Descartes or modern(ist) men such as John Locke seems like a bad end game.  Yes, I know how they tried to distance themselves from the perhaps more-collaborative and, therefore somehow, more-inclusive "Greco-Roman project of writing."   However, these fellows all are playing King of the Mountain, it seems to me.  (Someone could even write a dissertation on how influenced by certain Greeks, namely Aristotle, writers like many Roman men, and most anti-Aristotelian Enlightenment men, and more modern modernist men were.  And didn't they all, like Aristotle, try to be brighter than the next guy, even to the point of calling Aristotle names like unEnlightened and pre-modern and such?)  The whole system of authorship and ownership is older probably, I think, than history.  Sometimes it's the point of history to have authority over and to own.  Which is why Canada and the United States of America do well to take a month of each year for 'Black History Month' and then 'Woman History Month.'  By the people, red and yellow black and white, for the people, men and women, and of the people, the governments can for a couple of months allow authority to get checked.  This isn't just intellectualism or political correctness gone haywire.  There are consequences to who owns texts and how they are owned.  There is deconstruction and reconstruction and civil rights re-rightings to be done.  There is recovery and reviewing and rewriting to be done.

If we were a Jewish-Ukrainian polyglottal Portuguese-writing Brazilian named Clarice Lispector, yes even a woman, then we might call the typically male notion of "author-I-ty" how Mario Vargas Llosa, Marilyn French, and Hélène Cixous (in their 1996 project together) translate Lispector describing "It":

the ‘phallocratic system,’ the [author-It-ative] ‘system of inflexible last judgment, which does not permit even a second of incredulity’

The thing to note, and Cixous does this well, is that

Lispector herself ‘did not think in terms of phallogocentrism.’  How could she?

If we were an African-American woman named Toni Morrison whose Nobel Prize for Literature allows an opportunity to think on these things with an audience, then we would not think in terms of phallogocentrism either, would we?  No.  How could we?  What kind of authority is that?  Rather, we'd listen, as her griot, the wise blind woman, "the daughter of slaves, black, American, [who] lives alone in a small house outside of town" listens.  Yes, it's Toni Morrison.  She's thanking the Nobel committee out loud.  She is telling a parable like Jesus would.  She might be telling on us, like Nathan told on David by letting David tell on himself.  Here's a story thrown beside (y)our own.  Listen (if there are ears to hear):

She is worried about how the language she dreams in, given to her at birth, is handled, put into service, even withheld from her for certain nefarious purposes. Being a writer she thinks of language partly as a system, partly as a living thing over which one has control, but mostly as agency - as an act with consequences. So the question the children put to her: "Is it living or dead?" is not unreal because she thinks of language as susceptible to death, erasure; certainly imperiled and salvageable only by an effort of the will....

She is convinced that when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, indifference and absence of esteem, or killed by fiat, not only she herself, but all users and makers are accountable for its demise...

The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. 

Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek - it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language - all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.

The old woman is keenly aware that no intellectual mercenary, nor insatiable dictator, no paid-for politician or demagogue; no counterfeit journalist would be persuaded by her thoughts. There is and will be rousing language to keep citizens armed and arming; slaughtered and slaughtering in the malls, courthouses, post offices, playgrounds, bedrooms and boulevards; stirring, memorializing language to mask the pity and waste of needless death. There will be more diplomatic language to countenance rape, torture, assassination. There is and will be more seductive, mutant language designed to throttle women, to pack their throats like paté-producing geese with their own unsayable, transgressive words; there will be more of the language of surveillance disguised as research; of politics and history calculated to render the suffering of millions mute; language glamorized to thrill the dissatisfied and bereft into assaulting their neighbors; arrogant pseudo-empirical language crafted to lock creative people into cages of inferiority and hopelessness.

"It" is that ‘system of inflexible last judgment, which does not permit even a second of incredulity’ - "Author-I-ty" is that ‘systematic looting of language ... recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation.’

Now when we go back to thinking about Paul as a writer, as a collaborative writer, as not so in authoritative control of his text as an author should be, then can't we see how we might start thinking about ourselves?  If you are not oppressed, or if your parent or your grandparent or your great-grandparent wasn't, then there's something going on.  Without wanting to side or to take sides, maybe you already have.  Then there really are other sides here.  Can Paul write something that keeps slaves slaves?  That keeps wives submitted and silent?  That keeps gays damned?  And if you hear that "he" does write these things, that the text does say that, then what?

How about we listen a little more to what Dr. Vincent L. Wimbush says in  True to Our Native Land: An African American New Testament Commentary?

      Here are the radicalism and power of the interpretive stance taken and shared by [Toni] Morrison  and [W. E. B.] DuBois and so many other critics of African American life--that for black and subaltern critical consciousness there is no meaning in any Western-translated narrative, script, text, and tradition unless such is first ripped, broken, and then "entranced," blackened, made usable for weaving meaning.
      The metaphors here and throughout my article are mixed; they rather deliciously and poignantly run amok. Speaking so -- "in other words" -- is necessary in order to address complexity and pain and trauma. "Ripping the veil" means refusing to think according to and live dreamily within the realm of doxa, the realm of the canonical. It means accessing the sites of memory. Social therapy can begin only when these memories on their own terms -- not behind the "veil" of canonical text -- are woven together or "(re)textualized" (in the original meaning of that term) as "scriptures." And in agreement with writer-critic Ishmael Reed, it may mean, with ramifications most radical, that ultimately "we will make our own future text."

the Prostitute...

the Prostitute, Post-Pentateuch Persuasion, and Play in Bible Translation

Joshua is an important book for many reasons....  But what makes the book of Joshua overwhelmingly important is that it stands as a bridge, a link between the Pentateuch (the writings of Moses [i.e., "the Law," Torah]) and the rest of Scripture.
--Francis A. Schaeffer

We assume that the Homeric poet had a number of stories about Odysseus to draw on, but that he judiciously selected those stories that went together to transform what might have been merely an elaborate travel tale into an epic that explores the dimensions and facets of a larger-than-life heroic character....  A literary text, ...with stories and tales intricately linked into a single unitary document, seeks to explain, to bring meaning and order to paradoxical events of human experience.  In this sense, Joshua... approach[es] the Odyssey.
--Kenneth R.R. Gros Louis and Willard van Antwerpen, Jr.

Shortly after the translation was achieved, the Greek text of the Law would have been read and studied in Jewish synagogues in Alexandria....  With time, familiarity with the text grew.  Alexandrian and Egyptian Jews would slowly come to hold the LXX as sacred -- at least as sacred as the Hebrew original....  [T]he collective translators are part of the Homeric paradigm.
--Sylvie Honigman

You see what I'm doing, don't you?  I'm starting a post entitled "The Prostitute, Post-Pentateuch Persuasion, and Play in Bible Translation" with three epigraphs.  The epigraphs are to help us get to what I call "feminist rhetorical translating" of the Bible. They're to help us to uncover, to recover perhaps, some early and likely resistances to Aristotle.  The first epigraph is to emphasize that "the book of Joshua" comes after Torah, just as post-modernism comes after modernism but just as much as midrashim come after the oral-then-written tradition of Moses.  The second epigraph is to emphasize that "Joshua" is literary history.  The third epigraph is to emphasize that the little bit of Joshua in Greek that I'm going to post on (below) is midrashic, Homeric, Aristotle-defying stuff.  It's not the way we typically think of translation today, and that's the point of most translators who follow after Aristotle, isn't it?  But why not remember what the first translators of the Bible did?  Maybe we'll learn something.

This post has three main chapters.  They are:  I. Hebrew Wordplay, II. Aristotle's Word, and III. Opening Pandora's Pentateuch.

Chapter I --
Hebrew Wordplay

In the Hebrew version of Joshua, there's plenty of wordplay before translation.  By "wordplay," I mean both playfulness with words and wiggleroom in their interpretation.  For example, the name Joshua (יְהוֹשׁוּעַ) is playful and is ambiguous.  According to bəmidbar Sinai (aka Numbers 13:16), Moses nicknamed or renamed his assistant who had been named Hosea; and the former renamed the later the name Joshua (יְהוֹשׁוּעַ), and he did so by mixing the younger person's name (הוֺשֵׁעַ) with a contraction of the unspeakable Name (יהוה).  But the observed wordplay does not stop there.  According to a later Joshua (יְהוֹשׁוּעַ), perhaps, this littlest letter י -- in the name and in the Name -- is declared to be significant when he says (through the Greek translator Matthew):  "ἰῶτα ἓν ἢ μία κεραία οὐ μὴ παρέλθῃ ἀπὸ τοῦ νόμου" (i.e., Mt 5:18, "neither the littlest letter י nor some serif stroke will go away from Torah").  But the observed wordplay does not stop there.  According to midrash after Torah, there comes more interpretation of the name Joshua (יְהוֹשׁוּעַ); it is a name born of G-d from the name of the woman Sarai (שָׂרַי) who, as a mother, gives up her letter (י) which becomes his "letter yud."   But the observed wordplay does not stop there.  According to the freshest of rabbinic teachings of 2009, we should be able to see something:  can't we see it, whether Moses writing Torah intended it or not, that "one's two eyes are the two yuds"?  There is Hebrew wordplay in the name Joshua (יְהוֹשׁוּעַ), the name of certain people and the name of the first post-Pentateuch parchment.

In Hebrew, likewise, the name of the prostitute is playful and is full of illustrative possibilities.  Rahab (רָחָב) is a playful name with lots of interpretive play (or hermeneutic wiggle room in it).  She's a maid and she's a monster.  "Broad" might be a fair English language translation, since she's a woman and is wide like land where women can be gotten.  You really have to see the Hebrew of Genesis 34:21 to get this:

הָאֲנָשִׁים הָאֵלֶּה שְֽׁלֵמִים הֵם אִתָּנוּ וְיֵשְׁבוּ בָאָרֶץ וְיִסְחֲרוּ אֹתָהּ וְהָאָרֶץ הִנֵּה רַֽחֲבַת־יָדַיִם לִפְנֵיהֶם אֶת־בְּנֹתָם נִקַּֽח־לָנוּ לְנָשִׁים וְאֶת־בְּנֹתֵינוּ נִתֵּן לָהֶֽם׃

These men [are] peaceable with us; therefore let them dwell in the land, and trade therein; for the land, behold, [it is] Broad (רַֽחֲבַ) enough for them; let us take their daughters to us for wives, and let us give them our daughters.

Beyond the wordplay in names, then, there's play in the narrative, in "book" of Joshua itself.  The book of Joshua follows the closed books of Moses and thereby opens up a new library of books in Jewish history after Moses.  God has spoken to Moses, who has nicknamed Joshua and has written down everything God said, and put what's written in a box to be re-read.  Looking into that Torah box of Moses, says Hebraist Rachel Barenblat, "it can seem that the point the writer is trying to make is deliberately obscured beneath layers and levels of allusion and allegory."  Looking beyond that Torah box of Moses, says Christian linguist David Ker, one sees "more about humans than God...  that revelation comes in the context of a long trajectory of God’s dealings with humanity... a metanarrative... a long train wreck of the nation of Israel through apostasy and rejection of God’s covenant....  Ethnic hatred. Religious conflict. Revenge culture."  The first hero, right out of the box, is not even from the nation of Israel, and is not even a male, and is not even a clean female.  Rather, the very first hero is a foreigner, a woman hero, a prostitute for men, a dirty goyish heroine.  And, in Hebrew, there's a point in the story where the heroine, the prostitute, is left behind.  The story starts with her but, in order to get on with purifying the promised land, the story continues without her.  There's more than enough wordplay stuff in the Hebrew story (after Moses) to do a Ph.D. dissertation on and to blog and to teach and to publish on for years.

Aristotle despised such wordplay (as barbaric) and decided to shut it down (at least in Greek).  This is what makes the Jewish translation of Hebrew into Greek so fascinating.  As we'll get to in Chapter III, the translating Jews seem to want to open up meanings, rather blatantly playing with Aristotle's own words.

Chapter II --
Aristotle's Word

The Jewish-Greek translation of the book of Joshua is just as full of wordplay as the Hebrew original.  The wordplay of the translators, however, seems intentionally to spite Aristotle.  To get a good look at that in the next chapter, it's useful in this chapter to review Aristotle's project with the word.

Aristotle developed "logic" (λογ-ική) to box up the overdetermined, ambiguous slippery and playful Greek concept of "logos" (λόγος).  (Never mind that Aristotle himself is engaged in wordplay here.)  He railed against ambiguity, against parable, against hyperbole, against sophism.  He called "rhetoric" (ῥητορ-ική) a counterpart to "dialectic" (διάλεκτ-ική) -- both lesser than logic the way a female is lesser than a male.

Rhetoric, of course, is what Gorgias the sophist did.  And dialectic is what Socrates and Plato did.  The question is whether they could get to absolute reality, to pure knowledge, to certain truth.  Aristotle did sympathize with his teacher Plato, and his teacher Socrates.  They understood how Parmenides had separated "aletheia" (ἀλήθεια) or true truth from "doxa" (δόξα) or mere opinion.  They similarly understood how Gorgias, the mere rhetorician, had mixed "aletheia" and "doxa" in his "praise" of the prostituting Helen.  But Aristotle, when he wrote of rhetoric, used logic and got to true scientific knowledge (or ἐπιστήμη aka episteme) with the central concept of the "enthymeme" (ἐνθυμημα) or the "rhetorical syllogism" as the "body of 'pisteis' (πιστεις)" -- which has become known by rhetoric scholars today as the body of proofs or the body of persuasion.  (If you click on the previous link, then do notice how Aristotle boxes up "doxa" as the safer "endoxa.").  Aristotle taught his logic to elite Greek boys like Alexander the Great.  And Aristotle's project of a pure male logical elite Greek empire was nearly achieved by Alexander.

When we look at the Greek translation bit from the book of Joshua in the next chapter, the words to pay attention to are episteme, doxa, aletheia, enthymeme, and pistis.  Aristotle had a clear and pure and unambiguous and intentional meaning for each of these important words of logic (to avoid womanish rhetoric).  And yet the Jewish translators seem to have other things in mind.

Chapter III --
Opening Pandora's Pentateuch

My title for chapter III is playful, an attempt to drop Pandora's name so as to get us remembering what happened when her box was opened.  Pandora, of course, is the first woman for the Greeks which makes her some like Eve, the first woman of Torah and like Rahab, the first woman after Torah.  When wordplay translation opens up stuff after the Pentateuch, well, then, you can figure what happens.

My thesis is that the 72 translators of the legend of the Septuagint worked against Alexander's and Aristotle's project.  Here they are, Jews back in Egypt, again under the rule of a kingdom not their own.  Sylvie Honigman suggests that, though in this potentially subservient position, they've rather subversively turned Alexandria Egypt into a new Jerusalem, that they've resisted the imperial impositions of Aristotle's logic.  That's not to say they are pre-logical or post-logical or a-logical or illogical.  It is to say that they see what Aristotle has done by boxing up Greek.  They get what he intends by using the little "-icky" suffix on words, by changing "logos" to "logic."  They avoid the suffix like an Egyptian plague.

Now we can look at what the Jewish translators do by rendering the Hebrew of Joshua into Hellene.  We come again to that "point in the story where the heroine, the prostitute, is left behind."  We come to a turn, to the first villain.  This guy's trouble and troubling, and so his name is Achan (עָכָן).  We've come to the point in the story where the heroine is no longer necessary, to Joshua 7:1.

The contrasts are stark.  Whereas the hero is a woman, the villain is a man.  She's a foreigner; he's a son of Israel, from the very Jewish tribe of Judah.  They both hide something, but her lying and her knowledge of God save her; his eventual truth-telling and his opinion of God destroy him.

So now we get to the Greek.  For Aristotle, females were scientifically objectively lesser than males.  Males were the ones with the science, with certainty about Nature and Reality and Truth.  Remember the words (a) episteme, (b) doxa, (c) aletheia, (d) enthymeme, and (f) pistis?  Roughly, they mean (respectively) the following for Aristotle:  (a) "sure knowledge," (b) "mere opinion," (c) "Truth with a capital T," (d) "persuasion's logical body [which is less rigorous than a pure logical syllogism]," and (f) "proof or persuasiveness."

But this same Greek for the Jewish translators in Alexandria was more open.  They seem to take a tight set of Aristotle's strictly boxed up words and open them up.   Remember the words (a) episteme, (b) doxa, (c) aletheia, (d) enthymeme, and (f) pistis?  Now, not only do they mean the very boxed up meanings Aristotle meant them to mean but they also have Jewish-barbaric meanings as well.  Respectively and roughly, these Greek words for the Jewish translators also mean the following:  (a) "a whorish woman's confession," (b) "glory to God," (c) "the truth of a man named Trouble," (d) "outlawed coveteousness," and (f) "working faith or belief in God."

Here's the text.  I'm giving both the LXX translator's Greek and Brenton's English translation (mostly).

In Joshua 2:5, Rahab the prostitute persuades.  First, she lies, saying to the men of her nation about the Jewish spies:  "I know not [οὐκ ἐπίσταμαι episteme] whither they are gone."  Then (in verse 9), the foreign prostitute says to the Jewish spies:  "I know [ἐπίσταμαι episteme] that the Lord has given you the land."  The barbarian goyish woman denies having certain scientific knowledge and then claims she has it.  The LXX translators are using Aristotle's word as dirty, womanly opinion, as mere doxa.  By her rhetoric (through the Hebrew-to-Hellene translation), this prostitute saves and is saved.

So we leave the heroine and come to the villain.  His rhetoric is poorer, is less persuasive.  But the Hellene translation by the Hebrew readers is just as playful.

In 7:19, Joshua (the story's protagonist) says to the villainous trouble-making troubler named Achan:   "Give due opinion, that is, give glory (δόξαν doxa) this day to the Lord God of Israel, and give a confession; and tell me what thou hast done, and hide it not from me."  The translators use a word Aristotle associates with lying (i.e., doxa) as something inherently owed to God.  The wordplay is ironic, is funny, is suggestive of meanings now flying out of the box.

Then Achan replies (in verses 20 & 21):   "In truth [Ἀληθῶς aletheia] I have sinned against the Lord God of Israel: thus and thus have I done:  I saw in the spoil an embroidered mantle, and two hundred didrachms of silver, and one golden wedge of fifty didrachms, and I like a Torah outlaw coveted [ἐνθυμηθεὶς enthymeme] them and took them; and, behold, they are hid in my tent, and the silver is hid under them."  The translators have Achan confessing not with mere doxa but with Aristotle's absolute Truth.  But he confesses that he broke the 10th commandment of the Ten Commandments, and the translators have him "coveting" when they have him using Aristotle's "rhetorical syllogism," which is Aristotle's "body of proof or persuasion."  It seems the Jewish translators of their own playful Hebrew into playful Greek were playing with Aristotle and his student Alexander.

IV --

an afterword

Now, I understand that many rhetoricians and many bible scholars are going to argue with me here.  They might say:

"Sometimes words are homophones -- that is, they have different meanings though they sound (and sometimes even look) the same.  'Enthymeme' in Aristotle's Rhetoric is not the same word as 'enthymeme' here in Joshua 7.  You don't understand the nature of language and linguistics, basic stuff."

But I'm going to appeal to the rhetoricians and the bible scholars to talk to one another.   I'm going to ask us to compare our histories, to see how we fit in with Aristotle's paradigm.  (There's another word, the Greek word pisteis, that rhetoric scholars and bible scholars use differently too.  The New Testament writers, like Aristotle, are very keen on getting this right, and around Rahab - a woman, a prostitute, a foreigner - it seems most important -- See Hebrews 11:31 and James 2, especially 2:25)  So I would say this, in reply:

"The LXX translators tend to open up meanings of Greek words that Aristotle shut down.  The words and the meanings were once used by Homer, by Sappho, by the playwrights, and the other poets of old.  And the Septuagint translators have the vantage, the advantage, of seeing how both Aristotle and his predecessors used language differently.  The first Bible translators, the Jewish translators of their sacred Hebrew scriptures into their sacred Hellene scriptures, were much more open to wordplay than we tend to be.  We tend to follow Aristotle in shutting down meanings of words.  But the original linguists translating the Bible originally knew and behaved better, more playfully.  I think we could call it Torah and even post-Pentateuch persuasion.  If Willis Barnstone is willing to call Eve 'the mother of translation', then why can't we imagine Pandora as another Eve?   Why can't we be more willing to open the box?"

The real tragedy is the silencing of women (whether by rhetoric studies - more muting and erasing of women than "the male bastion of philosophy" - or whether by bible translation scholarship).  This silencing happens, I'm convinced, in large measure because of Aristotle and what feminists rightly call his boxed method of phallogocentrism.  Whether you're a man or a rhetoric scholar or a bible translator, what you risk missing by following Aristotle's separationist method is hearing women.  For example, you may miss hearing "Rahab and her sisters" as noted by Suzanne McCarthy in this BBB post; and you may miss hearing what Rahab has said (as noted in another post here at this blog) which notes how, in Joshua 2:14, "The Jews [translating their own Bible] have 'καὶ αὐτὴ εἶπεν' (for which [English translator] Brenton has 'and she said') for the original, ambiguous [and wordplay] Hebrew phrase 'אמֶר'.”  I'm hoping that we can at least listen to wordplay in bible translation, that we can remember what Greek was like before (and after) Aristotle, and in the best of all worlds that we can listen to so-called "womanly" discourse that acknowledges "all men and women" as "created equal."  We may have to recover feminisms, rhetorics, and translating that Aristotle once boxed up and put away.

 

St. Paul and Carnivals

Paul often gets paired with Aristotle, and below you'll find a bit more on Paul.  But first a quick review of Aristotle so as to consider the pairing of the two.  In a previous post, we ran through some questions about Aristotle's upbringing and motivations.  In this post, we want to look at his system for apprehending his world.  Then, we'll come back as quickly as we can to Paul.

If you read the extant texts of the entire corpus of what Aristotle wrote (which I chose to do for a dissertation), then you get his pure and precise categories.  Scholars such as Sara J. Newman are good to point out how sometimes the categories are inconsistent and are would-be "pure and precise categories."  But I'm talking about what Aristotle, the author himself, intended.  He intended practical things by his precise and pure categories.  He intended separations, mapping Nature into its hierarchy.  He intended a system of separations, into binaries, into a taxonomy of this but not that.  It's not just feminist scholars who recognize that Aristotle's pure and precise intention was phallologocentrism.  It is nevertheless mostly feminist scholars who see that the singular intention of Aristotle is yet his theme with three variations.  Clarice Lispector calls his intended theme, or phallogocentrism, that “system of inflexible last judgment, which does not permit even a second of incredulity.” And now we get technical as we look at three various aspects of the system:

One variation on the phallogocentric theme was masculinism.  Aristotle was quite intentional when he wrote of τά φαλλικά [ta phallika].  Most English translators have merely transliterated that the "phallic," but Aristotle purely and precisely meant "what's blatantly penis-esque" and used the word to write about the shape and the penetrating force of the rule by males in the Greek city states.

Another variation on the phallogocentric theme was the use of language to map nature. Aristotle was definitely intentional when he wrote of λογική [logike].  Most English translators have simply put English letters together for the Greek sounds to come up with "logic."  But Aristotle coined this word from λόγος [logos], a huge and overdetermined concept for knowing.  Logos in it's simplest sense meant "statement"; but Aristotle tightened up the word a bit with the suffix -ική so that his neologism became λογ-ική [log-ike] or, to translate, "statement-ista."  Aristotle intended this new logic to be the pure and precise method of stacking statements together from premise to premise to forced conclusion, syllogistically or by means of a syllogism [or ὁ συλλογισμός].  (This method of logic, for Aristotle, trumped the method of dialektike of his teachers.  Dialektike is the method that Plato had his own teacher Socrates using, a question-asking method of drawing truth and selecting and electing knowledge out of the one being asked.  It's a method perhaps developed by a kept-woman, a non-Greek kept-woman named Aspasia, who taught dialektike to men such as Socrates.  Plato writes glowingly of Aspasia, and Socrates praises her, but Aristotle who mentions many women never says a thing about her.  Of course, Aristotle, in The Metaphysics, uses logike to explain that dialektike is a less pure and a less precise method than his superior method of logike.  Moreover, to begin The Rhetoric, Aristotle writes that rhetorike is an antistrophos of dialektike -- the two counterpart methods of knowing both inferior to his logike.)

Thirdly, Aristotle was intentional when writing of κέντρον [kentron].  This has come down to us in partially-transliterated English translation as something like "centrality."  What Aristotle meant by the word was a "central pricking point"; his teacher Plato had used it for that part of the circle-drawing compass that sticks into the papyrus or the clay.  The elite Athenians, such as Solon, in Aristotle's Athenian Constitution got the point.  What Aristotle intended for his Greek students in the all-boy Aka-Demy was to have Greece, Athens centrally, to be the center of the world.  His student Alexander the Great got the point.  But Aristotle never intended his elite system to be ours in any way.

So now we can think about Paul.  If you read the entire extant corpus of what Paul wrote (which I was forced to do as a child), then you might start thinking about Aristotle.

As compared to Aristotle, Paul had a much better family upbringing on the one hand, and a much less pure upbringing on the other hand.  Aristotle lost his mother when he was very young and had to be raised by an uncle; his mother was from a elite family and may have left his father, a physician in the Macedonian king's court, with more than enough means for the teenager Aristotle to join Plato's famous Academy in Athens.  Paul writes of his own history to a group of Greek Jews and Jewish Greeks in Philippi, Macedonia, where Aristotle grew up.  Paul was also of a pure-breed family.  A Hebrew of Hebrews, he boasts and goes on about his clan of Benjamin and his penis circumcision that marked him as the Jewish Abraham's and /or Israel's great great great (you get the idea) grand-son.  He also had some elite education:  Paul was an excellent Torah student of the Separatists, also known as the purist Pharisees, the holiest פרושים [perushim].

What makes Paul a bit different from Aristotle is how impure he was.  Paul was not only a Jew but he was also a citizen of Rome.  Furthermore, not only did he speak Aramaic but he also was facile with Latin and Greek.  He was adept in his understanding of the holy Hebrew Law and other Scripture; and he knew the Hellene translation well, as well.  Paul could use Greek like a Greek, whether that was engaging Greeks in Greek rhetoric in Athens or sending Greek native speakers in their native Greek city states letters.  He could navigate between cultures, being all things to all for persuasive winning purposes, and he could mold culture by what he said and what he wrote.  He was able to bring Jews and Greeks together (i.e., one half-Greek Jewish boy named Timo-Theos "honorer of god(s)" he was able to make more pure by having his penis circumcised).  He would write of the advantages of the Jew first, and would write of the appropriation of Jewishness by the Greeks.    

Now I've run out of time for today.  But let me just say this.  Paul's approaches to men (vs women), to logic (vs rhetoric and dialectic and such), and to elitist centricism (vs feminisms and pluralisms and multiculuralisms) seem suspiciously like Aristotle's phallogocentrism.  Where I'm going with all of this, if time allows some other day, is this:  Paul's encounters with a Jew named Joshua and his apprentices began to unravel much of the Aristotelian(-like) system.  That was quite a carnival (or two).