Consider the case of Derrida’s missed transformative encounters with Paul, which I will explore further on. Why is it that Derrida deconstructs—or reads in what he calls a “materialist” mode—Platonic assumptions about intentionality in craft production or authorship in text production (realizing that these models so powerfully inform Platonic models of thinking itself), even as Derrida simply rejects and lampoons what he perceives to be the retrograde dualistic metaphysics of the apostle? The difference in treatment here is stunning and not without profound implications for the ongoing discursive life of cultural power: Plato’s dualistic metaphysic is worked into a model of complex material immanence, whereas Paul is simply expelled as a purveyor of a Platonism for the masses, a thinker of