sex with a vengeance: spiritual disembodiment ...


*

THIS
characteristic Augustinian text
[see 'mordechai' earlier today]
further enables us to understand
the conjunction of Jews with women
as the terms of a difference
[with a vengeance]
which is opposed to
allegorical
univocity.

Just as
the female body
with its disturbing two-ness
[both by being different from the male body
and by being "a sex which is not one"]
is the site of difference and fallen corporeality,
so also the Jews,
by refusing to be allegorized into
a spiritual disembodiment,
remain the site
of difference
and fallen
corporeality.


Elizabeth Castelli
has focused most sharply
on the extent
to which the drive for sameness
was constitutive of Pauline discourse
by analyzing the function of imitation
and its political effects
in his letters:


'The
language of imitation,
with its concomitant tension
between the drive toward sameness
and the inherent hierarchy of the mimetic relationship,
masks the will to power
which one finds in Pauline discourse.
Paul's appropriation
of the discourse of mimesis is a
powerful rhetorical move,
because this language identifies
the fundamental values
of wholeness and unity
with Paul's own privileged position
vis-a-vis the gospel,
the early Christian communities he founded
and supervises,
and Christ
himself.
HERE is precisely
where he makes his coercive move!
To stand for anything other than what the apostle stands for
is to articulate for oneself
a place of difference,
which has already implicitly been associated
with discord
and
disorder.
To stand in a position of difference
is to stand in opposition, therefore, to the gospel,
the community and
Christ.'



Castelli
describes
the personal will to power
implicit in the Pauline rhetorical drive toward sameness.
The same analysis can be applied, however, to the politics of group relations even after the apostle's
death.



What I am
suggesting here
is that as PAUL became ultimately
not an embattled apostle for one kind of Christianity contending with others but gradually the source of Christianity tout court,
and as so-called pagans faded from the scene,
the function of those who "stand in a position of difference"
came to be filled almost axclusively in the discourse
by the Jews,
and the "coercive move" toward sameness became directed AT
the Jews.



The place of difference
increasingly becomes the Jewish place,
and THUS the Jew becomes the very sign of discord and disorder
in the Christian polity.



That this is so
can be shown from the fact
that as other "differences" appear on the medieval European scene
- the Lollards, for example -
they are figured in literature as
"Jews."


The association
of Jews and women
as parallel terms of difference throughout western discourse is a further example of the reduction of Jewishness to a diacritic,
a signifier of difference
per se.



~*~



PAUL's
allegorical reading
of the rite of circumcision
is an almost perfect emblem
of his hermeneutics
of otherness.



IN
ONE STROKE,
by interpreting circumcision
as referring to spiritual
and not corporeal reality,
PAUL made it possible
for Judaism to become
a world religion.



It is not
that the rite
was difficult for gentiles to perform
- that would hardly have stopped devotees in the ancient world -
it was rather that it symbolized the genetic,
the genealogocal moment,
of Judaism as the religion of a particular
tribe of people.



This
is so
both in
the very physicality of the rite,
grounded in the practice of the tribe
and marking male members
of that tribe,
but it is even more so
as a marker on the organ of generation,
representing the genealogical claim
for concrete historical memory
as constitutive of
Israel.




By
substituting
a spiritual interpretation
for a physical ritual,
Paul was saying,
the genealogical Israel, "according to the flesh,"
is not the ultimate Israel;
there is an "Israel in
the spirit."


]
The practices
of the particular Jewish People
are not what the Bible speaks of,
but faith,
the allegorical meaning
of those practices.


It was
PAUL's genius
to transcend "Israel
in the flesh."

~verliefdcool!liefdesverdrietcool!verliefd~

26 aug 2005 - bewerkt op 27 aug 2005 - meld ongepast verhaal
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