"To become one with Christ, that means also to become with him the destroyer of the law; to have died with him, that means also to have died to the law"

"In this way, the cross or the message concerning the cross must be distinguished from what we have been enabled to see regarding the exposure of the violence of law through the great criminal or the general (proletarian) strike. For in these cases the violence of law seems to be exposed through a counterviolence, or what can at least be readily redescribed as a counterviolence. Thus the situation indicated by these examples may be (mis)read as the countering of one violence by another in which the powerlessness of justice relative to law does not really or clearly come to expression. What Paul is driving at, it seems, is a more clarifying instance in which it is the weakness of the messiah (perhaps of God or the divine as well), in the being overcome by violence--the violence of the law--that exposes the violence of the law and so is more powerful than the law and indeed really overpowers the law (which is also to say, the state, the empire, and so on)."

Reading Derrida/Thinking Paul: On Justice,
Theodore W. Jennings, Jr.
(Standford University Press, 2006)