ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a brief account of Paul's appearance in Lyotard before The Hyphen but will do so from the position of knowledge of the post-Hyphen Paul, where the earlier work acts as a fore-echo of that which then refigures it. Lyotard insists that Paul inaugurates Christianity. The reason for pausing to mention Augustine, is that in the period leading up to the publication of The Hyphen, Lyotard was not only addressing Paul more directly, but was doing so in the context of Augustine's relation to him. The Paul who initiates modernity is inevitably a figure who must be recognized, however spectrally, as inhabiting the spaces between the arguments Lyotard posits in relation to time, history and modernity. The dialectical trait seen by Lyotard in Paul's reading of the Torah is neither whimsical nor accidental. But Paul's pervasive absence is not tied to a semiotic substitutionality: it is the unstable predicate of everything that comes after.
