Over the course of his life, Benjamin Disraeli underwent several transformations. As a young man, he modeled his persona on Byron and wrote fashionable silver-fork novels. In middle age, he led an upstart parliamentary faction, “Young England,” despite being already nearly forty and several years older than his col¬leagues. As prime minister—in his sixties and seventies, exemplary of what Karen Chase calls “gray power” or gerontocracy— Disraeli was “a major architect of the late-Victorian imperial program.”2 Disraeli is easily read as a shapeshifting reflection of the zeitgeist. Take for example Daniel Schwartz's 1979 mono graph, which begins by contrasting two portraits that bookend Disraeli's trajectory of dramatic change:

In the Hawaii Five-0 II episode ‘Ikiiki i ka la o Keawalua’ (09/14), the murder of a gay rights activist leads the team to investigate a planned white supremacist terrorist attack. The episode also features Lou Grover (Chi McBride), the only Black member of the central team, explaining his experiences with racism, especially the use of slurs. It's one of the very few Hawaii Five-0 II episodes with gay characters, and both anti-Black racism and homophobia are somewhat inelegantly combined in being targets of white supremacist terrorist groups. Reviews on IMDb.com are hardly the best way to source audience responses, but the function to review individual episodes allows a survey of some of the most extreme opinions, and thereby, an opportunity to see what poles a ‘middle’ would need to mediate as ‘middlebrow’ culture. Many reviews on IMDb.com accuse the episode of being too left-wing. For example, one user comments:

The comment is indicative of the majority of the comments for the episode in accusing the series of left-wing bias and demanding for other terrorist groups to be shown instead (many of them feature in other episodes).

The second line of thought to be explored in order to derive an ontol¬ogy and an ethics from Paul's letters brings us to the themes of time and event. Moreover, this line allows us to address in more detail the sense of exception at stake in Paul's dialectic. The importance of time, tempo¬rality and event in the contemporary European philosophical reflections on being hardly needs to be stated. Emblematic in this respect are the titles of Heidegger's Being and Time and Badiou's Being and Event, but many more books with less iconic titles and many more authors may be added to these. Elsewhere, I have extensively examined and assessed how the critique of the ontotheological constitution of metaphysics has guided contemporary continental ontology in the direction of reflec¬tions on the event, so I will not repeat this analysis here. However, in this chapter, I do want to show why, amid the many sources available from ancient culture, it is Paul, rather than, say, Plato or Aristotle, who offers the philosophical means to think event and time in such a way that these provide a genuine alternative to the ontotheological paradigm. Moreover, I argue that the alternative arising in this way significantly contributes to the other dialectic legacy of Paul pursued in this study.

For clarity's sake, let me add that this also means that I am less interested in the role that the philosophical reflection on time and event play in the conceptualisation of the end of history, which framed several approaches to Paul in the 1990s and early 2000s.