I N D I R E C T I O N S

World AIDS Day: "We Live Past Hope"

2011-12-01T23:28:00.004-06:00

"[W]hat you hear in my voice is fury, not suffering. Anger, not moral authority"

-- Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (p. 132)

"[W]e shall love each other here if ever at all."

- Audre Lorde, "Martha" from Cables to Rage (1970)

As the last few minutes of December 1st pass, I wanted to draw attention to an annual observance. Across the globe it was World Aids Day . It is an opportunity for all of us each year to unite and recommit ourselves to ending this global pandemic. It has been thirty years since the first reported cases of this death dealing disease afflicted members of the GLBT community. It was even first called GRID (gay-related immune deficiency), a term as misleading as it was stigmatizing. Although a diagnosis of HIV+ no longer means the death sentence it once did in the 1980s (or, at least, it doesn't in much of the developed world and often only if one can afford the drug cocktail necessary to prolong life), it still remains a highly stigmatizing disease, especially in the developing world. But it knows nothing of boundaries: it affects all races, all socio-economic levels, all countries, all sexual orientations ... all people.

Where HIV/AIDS has divided and killed, it has also enabled the formation of new coalitions (like the justly famous ACT-UP) and fostered new tactics of survival (tactics both physiological and spiritual). It has spurned not only some of my generation's great examples of agit prop but also exceptional works of literature, poetry, theater, and other cultural artifacts both mournful and empowering -- perhaps empowering precisely because mournful. Indeed, much of the very possibility of queer studies scholarship came about as both academics and activists (and the multiple combinations that those titles perform) lent their voices as well as created spaces for listening to the forgotten, ignored, bereft, and dead. The affective register became for this scholarship its very condition of possibility.

The theme for the 2011 observance is "Getting to Zero" -- getting to zero new diagnoses of HIV-infections. But just as this is a time to recommit ourselves to this important, generations-long fight, it is equally a time to remember all those who have died. It is also a time to make penance for the many ways our societies and religious communities have used their ill-formed rhetorics of fear and hatred. What should have been words of healing balm became rather missives of hurtful speech.

But I wish to close on a more hopeful note, by sharing one of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite (and justly celebrated) contemporary plays -- Angels in America. (I'd also recommend listening to an earlier NPR interview with Tony Kushner on the 20th anniversary of the play.) But the scene I share from the 2003 HBO film version occurs as the title character, Prior Walter, stands before the heavenly principalities and pleads his case for "more life." It is also probably the finest statement of Kushner's own philosophy/theology: we live in spite of the tragedies that befall us, "we live past hope."

CFP: College Theology Society 2012

2011-10-13T12:41:00.001-05:00

I'm so very long behind in blogging. I have several posts I'm trying to finish and others I'm beginning to sketch. It's, of course, terribly difficult to get such things done when you work full-time in Baltimore and go to school in DC (with mid-terms right around the corner), plus other obligations. Hopefully, I'll be able to get some of these and other things done. In any event, I wanted to pass along this announcement from one of my long time favorite academic societies, although I'm yet to attend one of its conventions. The theme is both timely and provocative.

College Theology Society 2012 Convention: "Found in Translation: Living Faith in New Contexts"

Religious traditions live by translation, as religions are expressed not only in different languages but also in various social and cultural contexts. Artists, missionaries, public theologians, scholars, and teachers have always sought ways to communicate religious convictions and questions to new audiences. Those efforts at translation often bring controversy, as the recent history of Christianity, from Wyclif and Tyndale to the Roman Catholic Church’s new English translation of the Roman Missal, abundantly shows. Still, translation remains essential to religion, particularly in a globalized world that gives access to, and responsibilities toward, people whose voices would not have easily been encountered generations ago. This new access—through the proliferation media, greater ease of travel, and perhaps especially the extent of current migration—is changing daily lives throughout the world, challenging people to negotiate the differences that emerge. As people interact in new ways, dominant cultures find themselves not only translating, but translated into, new social realities. In these interactions, translation has served too often as a tool of colonization, including the destruction of languages and cultures. But it has served as well in the service of enculturation that enriches religious traditions, as in the artwork and vital community of San Antonio’s San Fernando Cathedral, and the transformative dialogues that can arise between religions. What new possibilities for our lives and our religious traditions are emerging through such translations? What valued wisdom of the past are we in danger of losing? Where might we need to acknowledge that different languages and worldviews are incommensurable, impossible to translate fully enough? And how, as teachers and scholars of religion, can we assist our students, our faith communities, and our world in the translations necessary to meet the challenges of our time?

See here for the listing of individual sections and conveners. The CTS, which was established in 1953, will meet this year at Saint Mary's University of Texas in San Antonio from May 31 through June 3, 2012

Examining Assumptions: "Ever Intent upon Heavenly Things"

2011-08-28T18:54:00.011-05:00

Photo: Window, St Aloysius in Somers Town, London.

"To be a human being is to be open to infinitely more than simply being a human being."

Jean-Luc Nancy,

Noli me tangere: On the Raising of the Body

Two weeks ago, back on Monday, August 15th, was the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, or what in the Eastern Christian churches is called the "Dormition of the Theotokos" (for some history see here). Although theological and liturgical traditions dealing with this aspect of mariology date back to the earliest Christian centuries, for Roman Catholics is was on Noveber 1, 1950, that Pope Pius XII solemnly declared the Assumption a dogma. Within the hierarchy of church teaching, a dogma is defined as a revealed truth pertaining to faith or morals, and therefore requiring belief for salvation. While ostensibly about the Virgin, the dogma of the Assumption actually teaches an eschatological truth.

Okay. I can see the eyes rolling. But wait, don't click away just yet. Please.

Yes, there's something about Mary when it comes to Catholics. Indeed, even the great twentieth-century Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth recognized the centrality of the Marian doctrines to Catholicism, although it is for that very reason that Barth cannot regard Catholicism's mariological obsession as true Christianity: he accepted the common dogmatic tradition of the early church, but denied her cultic veneration by Catholics, which he saw as "overloading" the doctrinal content. In volume 1.2 of his celebrated Church Dogmatics, Barth doesn't mince any words, explicitly calling Mary's veneration a "heresy" and "cancer" that needs rooting out. For Barth, veneration of the Virgin was nothing short of a mistake, "an excrescence, i.e., a diseased construct of theological thought": "Wherever Mary is venerated, and devotion to her takes place, there the Church of Christ does not exist."

Much of my own life has been spent being formed in/by institutions dedicated to her patronage: my childhood parish and its parochial school that attended from K-12 grades, Our Lady of Pompei (I share this link somewhat ambivalently); my undergraduate college, Mount St. Mary's University; and now the Baltimore church choir with which I sing, the Basilica of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. I even recall the pastor of my childhood parish asking me, upon a visit home from college, whether in my theological studies I would be taking coursework in mariology. I bristled at the thought, chalking up his question to his pre-Vatican II seminary training, and usually treating further examples of courses offered in mariology as conservative throwbacks. But Mary is central to several prominent Catholic theologians and church leaders of the late 19th and 20th centuries: M. J. Scheeben, Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balathasar, Wojtyla/John Paul II, Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, and even so-called progressive thinkers like Edward Schillebeeckx, Karl Rahner, and Leonardo Boff. But it's safe to say that I have never had a particularly personal devotion to the Virgin Mary. I do, however, understand and appreciate her role in popular religiosity, and works by Rachel Fulton, Margot Fassler, Miri Rubin, Stephen J. Shoemaker, Donna Spivey Ellington, Jaroslav Pelikan, George Tavard, and Robert Orsi help clarify the histories and ethnographic practices of these Marian beliefs. Still, my Catholicism (whatever it may be) has always been heavily influenced by what Lutheran theologian Paul Tillich called the Protestant Principle, which might also explain my affinity toward/for certain brands of postmodern theology (e.g., Caputo) the general retrieval of apophatic and mystical traditions.

Many feminist theologians have rightly pointed to how oppressive and patriarchal appeals to Mary can be. Writers like Brazilian Sr.Ivone Gebara in Mary, Mother of God, Mother of the Poor; Sri Lankan Fr. Tissa Balasuriya in Mary and Human Liberation; and Fordham University professor Sr. Elizabeth Johnson in Truly Our Sister have pointed toward new ways to reactive this ancient symbolic language. Gebera, a leading figure in ecofeminist Latin American theology, was silenced by then Prefect Ratzinger (forced to study traditional theology for 2 years), and I haven't been able to locate much else about her, though she has since continued to publish. In Balasurya's case, such work lead to doctrinal investigation and ultimately to an excommunication that was later rescinded when he was reconciled with the Church. Johnson offers a mariology "from below" that aims to be "theologically sound, spiritually empowering, ethically challenging, socially liberating, and ecumenically fruitful." For Johnson, Balasuriya, and others, Mary, when properly understood within her scriptural matrix, becomes not a blight but a blessing for liberative theological projects.

But where does this leave me and the Assumption? It's not my intention to deny or defend the dogma, but I do want to share a few brief, but I think significant thoughts, from a theologian who remains a decisive if sometimes problematic influence on me, the great German Jesuit Karl Rahner. WIT has also posted on Rahner and the Assumption, giving especial attention to Rahner's justly praised "hermeneutics of eschatological statements" insofar as these relate to the Assumption. They don't, however, concern themselves with the particular essay that is my focus.

In the first volume of his Theological Investigations series, Rahner published his paper "The Interpretation of the Dogma of the Assumption" (pp. 215-27). Indeed, Rahner had prepared an entire manuscript on the Assumption that went unpublished for fifty years, after a Jesuit censor nixed it in 1951. So, an under-appreciated and often ignored aspect in Rahner is how central both Mary and the saints are for his theological project. Dr. Peter Fritz has been attempting to rectify this (along with showing Rahner's versatility for the future): see here for his still available paper from the 2011 Karl Rahner Society annual meeting (they don't leave them up indefinitely!). Fritz's paper makes a number of very important observations. Noting the apparent non-centrality of Mary to Rahner's theological project, Fritz nonetheless observes:

Many of Rahner’s Marian writings seem to concern the development of dogma only; thus Mary appears to be a peripheral figure for him, whereas she appears central for Hans Urs von Balthasar. But a closer reading of Rahner’s Marian writings, when they are placed in the context of mid-twentieth century theological debates, particularly the controversy over the “fundamental principle” for Mariology, reveals that Mary, if she does not reside at the center of Rahner’s theology, allows us access to this center, from somewhere other than the periphery.

One intriguing thing Fritz extrapolates from Rahner's mariology is not simply that it is important, but how Rahner goes about his mariological tasks. In other words, and this goes to the heart of censorship of Rahner's book on the Assumption by his confrere, what matters is Rahner's performance of a Catholic theological ethos. The Jesuit censor, as Fritz points out, objected to Rahner's work, because Rahner didn't hue closely enough to the argumentative strategy of the papal teachings. Whereas Rahner's interpretation and argument for the Assumpotion's dogmatic importance might end up at the same place as Pius XII, for the Jesuit censor it was necessary for Rahner to engage in a formal repetition of the papal language. This, of course, would be slightly impossible, because, as Fritz rightly points out, Rahner and Pius have significantly different starting points. Fritz comments:

When Rahner thinks about Mary's Assumption, he asks first how her final end relates to the whole of salvation history. Pius, on the other hand, emphasizes the private significance of the Assumption for Mary. These varying approaches to the Assumption do not lead to a complete divergence between Rahner's and Pius's conclusion...but they do raise the question of how a Catholic theologian might best arrive at such conclusions.

But what I think is so important here, and which Fritz spends a brief time elaborating at the conclusion of his essay, is this very question of ethos:

Is Catholicism's ethos properly deployed as a strict enforcement of "the sacred," a determinate sector occupied by the rosary, the Eucharist, and those who partake in them, or as the radical openness of human life toward future fulfillment, an openness that uses multiple paths -- some manifestly sacred and others not -- to advance toward enjoyment of God? In fact, it may be both, so long as the former does not cancel out the latter tout court. This last clause, of course, is the key.

As a rhetorical term, ethos names the character or guiding beliefs of a community or determinate social group. Its literal Greek meaning is "accustomed place," and its Latin equivalent is mores. We might think of ethos as something akin to Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus. To speak of ethos in relation to theology and Christian practice is therefore to ask not only what the operatively fundamental dispositions are but also to raise the question of what constitutes proper persuasion. That is, within any given ethos there operate certain rules and grammars by which certain speeches can and others not be heard. Ethos names the anterior field our of which the power of our theological language emerges and from which it derives its solicitation.

Let me turn now to Rahner's essay, "The Interpretation of the Dogma of the Assumption." To read Rahner is, I believe, to experience the pleasures of theological indirection. We must immediately note that Rahern's concern is with interpretation, or with "an exposition of the content of the new dogma" in order "to understand what is really meant by saying that someone is corporeally glorified in heaven" (pp. 215-16). Rahner outlines his approach:

Thus is we wish to know what is really involved in the substance of this defined proposition, our best plan is to ask first of all in what wider context of Christian truths it really belongs. The true meaning of any individual proposition of revealed truth does indeed contain an 'item' of new knowledge, which is added on to the other truths, enlarges and completes them; yet a proposition of this kind is itself only really intelligble in the totality of the one saving Truth. We may regard this totality as plainly set out for the first time in the Apostle's Creed. Our question then runs as follows: To which article of faith does the new dogma belong as its consequence and organic unfolding?

In answer to his question, Rahner posits three creedal phrases to which the "new dogma" relates: (a) "born of the Virgin Mary"; (b) "descended into the Kingdom of the dead"; and (c) "the resurrection of the flesh." In relation to the first phrase, Rahner does discuss the (now still) controversial claim that, as theotokos, Mary is "co-redemptrix." For Rahner, Mary is co-redemtrix, not because she shares ontologically in Christ's redemption of the world but because she "co-operates" in Christ's saving act, "insofar as she does, for the salvation of the whole world and not only for her own, what a human being can and must do in the power of grace and for grace: receive it" (pp. 217-18).

But it is with respect to the third creedal phrase that Rahner locates the most decisive meaning of the this "new dogma." He writes:

She who by her faith received salvation in her body for herself for us all, has received it entire. And this entire salvation is a salvation of the entire human being, a salvation which has already begun even in its fullness. Mary in her entire being is already where perfect redemption exists, entirely in that region of being which came to be through Christ's Resurrection (p. 225).

Rahner's position, in short, is that in the Virgin all creation finds an anticipation of a transfigured state. She already participates in that "perfect redemption" of which the gospel preaches. For him, Mary symbolizes in "the most perfect way possible" what a fully "redeemed person is and can be." Mary's fiat symbolizes the human person's truest act freedom. Her assumption (or dormition) is a prolepsis of all of creation's eschatological hope.

He continues:

The salvation of the flesh too has already begun in its final form. The world is already in transition to God's eternity, not only in the 'spirit' of those who have gone to their everlasting home and not only in the body of the Son who came 'from above,' but also in the bodies of those who are simply 'from below.' Even now there belongs to the reality of the entire creation that new dimension which we call heaven and which we shall also be able to call new eather once it has subjected all earthly reality to itself and not just an initial part of it (p. 226).

If mariology was for Barth a metastasized cancer, it is for Rahner a healing balm: the problem with protestantism, says Rahner, is that they only have a theology of the cross and not a theology of glory "as a formula for reality here and now" (p. 226). Certainly in her maternity, Mary symbolizes the generativity of creation. But where others would and still do posit maternity as a fundamental mariological principle, Rahner proposes what is always his basso continuo -- graced nature (cf. Johnson, p. 145; Fritz, p. 5). What makes Rahner's position so fruitful is how he ensures that a fundamental mariological principle, should such a principle exist, is actually fundamental: whatever else it might do, for a mariological principal to be truly fundamental it must touch on the very core of theological thought. Rahner concludes his essay with these words:

But for anyone who believes that counter to all appearances the forces of thee world to come have already seized hold of this world, and that these forces do no consist merely in a promise, remaining beyond every sort of creaturely existence, for a future still unreal; for such a one the 'new' dogma is really nothing more than a clarification, throwing light on a state of salvation already in existence....The 'new' dogma has significance not only for mariology but also for ecclesiology and general eschatology" (pp. 226-27).

Rahner's mariology is part and parcel with his continual concern for the proper telos of human fulfillment. His work on the Marian doctrines (but especially the Assumption) mediates, as Fritz suggests, between theology and its ethos, thereby suggesting that if theology is to possess "vigor, cogency, and cognitive power" (to repurpose a phrase of R. R. Reno's) it must remain somehow connected to an ecclesially mediated pneumatic existence. Indeed, as Brian Daley, S.J. argues in a recent article, much of what constitutes the differences in approaches and understandings of Mary's role are related not solely to "the form in which that doctrine is expressed as part of the central faith and practice of the church" but "are really differences in ecclesiology: what one expects of the church, how the church communicates the gospel, where one looks for the church in its fullness" (pp. 860 and 862). But suggesting a connection between vision and virtue, Rahner is not in any way prescribing veneration of the Virgin as a litmus test for orthodoxy, not least because Rahner recognizes in such veneration the historicity of all Catholic devotional life.

To conclude this rather long post -- a length that I still find odd, given my lack of personal devotion to the Virgin -- I wonder if we might not think of doctrinal language as cognitive maps of available affects (with bows here to Sianne Ngai's wonderful text, Ugly Feelings). Doctrines, like texts, register (communicate?) certain modalities of experience and existence; in them affects are condensed (but hopefully not calcified). The now not-so-new dogmatic language of the Assumption places the experience of hoping at its core, and it is hope that moves us into a future. As a traditional Collect for the Assumption reads:

Almighty and everlasting God,
You have taken up body and soul
into the heavenly glory the Immaculate Virgin Mary, Mother of Your Son: Grant, we beseech You, that, ever intent upon heavenly things,
we may be worthy to be partakers of her glory.

This prayer to be "ever intent upon heavenly things" asks of its supplicants an affective posture: to rest in the hope that this historical existence will be transformed and enlivened. Mary's Assumption is creation's prolepsis: in her "most perfect redemption" believers witness what it means to partake, as she does, in Divine glory. In Mary, the human person's constitutive openness to infinity is made manifest.

-------

Brian Daley, "Woman of Many Names: Mary in Orthodox and Catholic Theology," Theological Studies 71 (2010), 846-869.

New Open-Access Journal: Lumen et Vita

2011-08-26T21:32:00.000-05:00

In the course of googling for something random, I came across this interesting and newly minted open-access online journal, Lumen et Vita, which is the "graduate academic journal of the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry." It looks to, at least presently, an annual publication, with volume 1 having just appeared sometime this year. It also appears to be presently restrict submissions to members of the student body of BC's STM. I hope that both it increases it's frequency and opens the submissions process up to graduate students at other institutions. I think this latter point is especially important, because, unlike other fields in the Humanities (e.g., English), there are no graduate student journals of theology (or at least none to my knowledge). I also hope they increase the number of books reviewed.

Still, the initiate ought to be congratulated, since it importantly moves theology further into the new world e-scholarship. Here's the table of contents for the inaugural volume:

Articles
Redefining Spirit Through the Body for the Healing and Flourishing of Trauma Survivors
Paige Cargioli

Suffering Our Way to Salvation: Ivone Gebara, Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, and the Adequacy of the Cross as a Symbol for Women
Amy Chapman

The Human as Encounter: Karl Barth's Theological Anthropology and a Barthian Vision of the Common Good
Benjamin Durheim

From Theoretical to Practical: Developing Tillich's Aologetics
Wendy Morrison

Millennium Development Goals and Catholic Social Teaching: Ongoing Responsibility and Response
James O'Sullivan

The Consciousness and Human Knowledge of Christ according to Lonergan and Balthasar
Aaron Pidel, S.J.

Book Review
God's Many-Splendored Image: Theological Anthropology for Formation
Luis Joshua Sáles

Food and Bodies Transformed

2011-04-21T09:17:00.004-05:00

On this Holy Thursday, I wanted to share two passages that I find particularly striking. The evening Mass of the Lord's Supper, celebrated on Holy Thursday, opens the Holy Triduum (which closes with Evening Prayer on Easter Sunday). This period of solemnity and celebration is considered the "culmination of the liturgical year." Holy Thursday in particular celebrates the giving of the Eucharist to the Church.

The first quotation comes from the great American liturgical theologian Aidan Kavanagh's The Shape of Baptism (1978):

To know Christ sacramentally only in terms of bread and wine is to know him only partially, in the dining room as host and guest. It is a valid enough knowledge, but its ultimate weakness when isolated is that it is perhaps too civil....However elegant the knowledge of the dining room may be, it begins in the soil, in the barnyard, in the slaughterhouse; amid the quiet violence of the garden, strangled cries, and fat spitting in the pan. Table manners depend on something's having been grabbed by the throat. A knowledge that ignores these dark and murderous human gestes is losing its grip on the human condition.

Aside from the jarring juxtaposition of imagery so characteristic of Kavanagh's prose, there is an obvious inference he means for his readers to draw: to celebrate the Eucharist in the comfort and security of our often sanitized liturgies apart from an active remembrance of the suffering and sacrificial death of Christ is to ignore the abiding heart of the Eucharist: "Table manners depend on something's having been grabbed by the throat." In the decades following the Second Vatican Council, this concern to re/connect liturgy to life, worship to the witness for social justice, finds some of its profoundest articulations in theologians influential to, associated with and/or inspired by developments in Liberation Theology. Thinkers like Karl Rahner, Gustavo Gutierrez, Juan Segundo, Tissa Balasuriya, J. B. Metz, Edward Schillebeeckx, Piet Schoonenberg, and others have exceptional meditations on this aspect of the Eucharist, often tied to equally penetrating analyses of the sacramental presence of Christ.

For appreciating these points within an American context, I can't recommend anything more highly than the late Monika Hellwig's (1929-2005) still moving essay, The Eucharist and the Hunger of the World. Hellwig begins with a phenomenological description of the human experience of hunger (for food, freedom, meaning, truth, authenticity, etc) along with a description of the basic Eucharistic action as the sharing of a meal, and then employs these to underscore and reinforce a belief in the radical interdependency of all people. Through a series of compassionate sketches of how global poverty stalks and brutalizes its victims, leaving them bereft of not only sustenance but even human dignity itself, Hellwig concretizes the meaning of the Eucharist for a needy world.

This leads me to my second, and significantly longer, quotation from Sara Miles's memoir Take This Bread. It's a curious book, as its author confesses, since it charts the most unlikely of conversions. But for that very reason, an eminently appropriate religious book. The following passage comes from the prologue, pp. xiii-xv:

Beyond any single moment of epiphany, my conversion was a long, complicated, and often unconscious journey. When I left the home of my atheist parents, I had no reason to think I was looking for God: I just knew I wanted to experience meaning and connection. The material world was my ground: bodily experiences the context in which I searched for knowledge and love, political and moral purpose. I looked in all kinds of places, often extreme: in the heat and exertion of restaurant kitchens, in poor people's revolutions and in war zones, in engaged journalism and passionate politics, in love affairs with men and women, in the birth of my child. Something was tugging at me. It drew me form individual experience to collective experience, crossing lines each time -- lines of family, of nation, of people, unlike me -- to find intimate human connection. I saw people betray their friends sacrifice for strangers; I saw people suffer and starve; I saw people transcend their own limitations to nurture others and become part of communities. Everywhere I saw bodies and food.

Food and bodies had always been wrapped in meaning for me: They were my way of understanding the world. But it would take decades to have these accumulated experiences make sense in a narrative, much less one I'd call Christian. It took actually eating a piece of bread -- a simple chunk of wheat and yeast and water -- to pull those layers of meaning together: to make food both absolutely itself and a sign pointing to something bigger. It turned out that the prerequisite for conversion wasn't knowing how to behave in a church or having a religious vocabulary or even a priori "belief" in an abstract set of propositions: It was hunger, the same hunger I'd always carried.

Holy communion knocked me upside down and forced me to deal with the impossible reality of God. Then, as conversion continued, relentlessly challenging my assumptions about religion and politics and meaning, God forced me to deal with all kinds of other people. In large ways and small, I wrestled with Christianity: its grand promises and its petty demands, its temptations and hypocrisies, its ugly history and often insufferable adherents. Faith for me didn't provide a set of easy answers or certainties: It raised more questions than I was ever comfortable with. The bits of my past -- family, work, war, love -- came apart as I stumbled into church, then reassembled, through the works communion inspired me to do, into a new life centered on feeding strangers: food and bodies, transformed. I wound up not in what church people like to call 'a community of believers' -- which tends to be code for 'a like-minded club -- but in something huger and wilder than I had ever expected: the suffering, fractious, and unbounded body of Christ.

What Miles articulates connects nicely to what I was only intimating at above: the relation that obtains between the form of one's prayer and the comportment of one's worldly actions. To speak of a transubstantiation of the gifts of altar is not enough; we must also discover and sustain those actions that transubstantiate the world around us so as to become more fully aligned with the good and liberating intentions of God's reign. As the great English Dominican Herbert McCabe once wrote, "In all sacraments God shows us what he does and does what he shows us." Sara Miles discovers this ancient sacramental principal -- expressed in a wonderful chiasmus by McCabe rather than the traditional cumbersome Latin terminology -- when she understands how knowledge of the world comes through "food and bodies."

The Eucharist becomes, to slightly re-purpose the phrasing of the medievalist and theologian Oliver Davies, "the thematic key not only to the way the world is, but also to what and how we are, and to what God has given us of himself to hold and to understand" (The Creativity of God: World, Eucharist, Reason, p. 7). This is all a case of what Davies would further term "eucharistic semiotics." It was and remains a goal of the Second Vatican Council that our liturgical signs should, rather than be kept safe in highly ritualized observes, really signify. To appreciate the Eucharist has the summit from and toward which everything flows is to risk disturbing our worship habits. Truly there is no more "perverse core" to Christianity (to borrow Zizek's phrase) than what Sara Miles's conversion taught her to understand: the material world is our ground, but it is a world of "food and bodies, transformed."

On Making a Return

2011-04-21T02:35:00.004-05:00

Silkrock formation, Paria Canyon (Vermillion Cliffs Wilderness Area, AZ)

"No human life, not even the life of the hermit in nature's wilderness, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies
to the presence
of other human beings.

-- Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

"Joys impregnate.
Sorrows bring forth."

-- William Blake

Well, it has been just over a year since my last blog post. While I've been lurking on many blogs, I've been relunctant to resume my own, choosing reclusivity rather than re-engagement. Because I've been dealing with a number of serious professional setbacks that correlate with and directly impact a series of equally serious and, admittedly, devastating personal experiences (with all their attendant affects of fear, failure, grief, and the like), I've held my tongue here for fear of what I might actually say. Perhaps fittingly, I'll (only somewhat less cryptically) say more about some of this indirectly through a post I'm currently writing on the swerve (away) from happiness (this might develop into several posts or a series). That periphrastic enough for you?!

My general hope is to resurrect and relaunch this blog by posting more regularly, including reflections, striking quotations, commentary on items I may be reading at any given moment, various announcements, and even some of my own work as/if it materializes. Most importantly, I want this blog to serve as a companion to my thoughts during a continued period of bereavement for and because of dreams deferred, hopes made despondent, bureaucratic evils, and the possibility of a future self that will have been made extinct. If, as this blog's thesis avers, we are only ever indirectly ourselves, then we are equally always grieving over a future self left unrealized. But, curiously, what can sometimes find actualization is a path left fallow years ago, thereby becoming reacquainted with a self we thought to have long ago rejected or forsaken. So, perhaps an element in the realization of our indirect subjectivities is a rendering present of our widowed selves.

For now, I'll be posting during the Triduum.

UPDATED: The Works of Friendship

2010-04-06T04:10:00.001-05:00

A few months back, I offered a somewhat lengthy post on the scholarship and activities of several people with whom I have been acquainted -- friends, teachers, colleagues, and the like. Well, I've gone ahead and updated that listing, including adding a few additional write-ups. Check it out.

Updated post on The Works of Friendship

Thomas Merton and Rowan Williams: Thoughts on Trust, Desire, and the Finding of an Orientation

2010-02-24T04:25:00.004-06:00

I have recently found myself ruminating over a thought-passage from the always inexhaustible writings of the great American Trappist monk Thomas Merton (1915-68). The following text comes from his slim but classic Thoughts in Solitude, first published in 1956. Indeed, another scholar-priest and poet-mystic, the current Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams (b. 1950), has called this text "one of [Merton's] most profound and abidingly impressive books."

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will no fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone (p. 79).

What I've called a thought-passage is more traditionally labeled a prayer. What I find so resonate in these words is Merton's brutal honesty: he has no idea where he is headed but rather than despair he emplots his anxiety within a horizon of hopefulness. His self-doubt and trepidation finds its only security in complementary intuitions about the Divine and a life lived in relation to that fundamental principle: "I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope that I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire." To comport oneself according to such an eros is to make trust one's most fundamental orienting desire.

Rowan Williams, in his January 29th concluding remarks to the gathering "Building an Ethical Economy" at Trinity Wall Street in New York City, took up the question of trust in a way I find remarkably resonant with Merton, since both men use trust as the horizon of hopefulness to frame an otherwise unclear and perhaps motivationally paralyzing set of experiences (Williams's remarks on trust start in at about 26mins). Trust, says Williams, is "not only about mutual belief"; rather, at a "slightly deeper level, it's about having some confidence that you are not completely indifferent to my interests. I trust you to tell me the truth because I believe you have a sufficient concern for my interests not to be misleading me....Trust is a belief that the Other shares something of my interest." This means that the "charge and challenge" is to ask, "Whose interests do I recognize?" In the Archbishop's estimation, faith can play a larger part in society and culture by helping individuals "to imagine more deeply and broadly the interests of the Other." A deficit of trust goes hand in hand with a deficit in relationships. The "most basic of questions," then, is, "Why should I be trusted, and how do I set my life on a course that makes it trustworthy?" For Williams, the answer to that question of the form of our relating is necessarily bound up with the theological question of "why we trust God." Admittedly "boiling down" a great deal of theological reflection, Williams concludes:

Christian theology, at its best, has always said we can trust God because God has made us when God didn't need to. God has created what is other to the Divine Life so that it may be loved. Because nothing we can do can make God happier, safer, richer, or anything of that kind. God, as Clement of Alexandria said many centuries ago, is distinctive in that God loves what he has no natural communion with. Because God is God. And the miracle is that God has created a world to be in communion with the Divine love. God, in short, recognizes our interest by the sheer fact of creating us. We know that God is not in the business of creation and redemption because of God's interest, but because of ours. And so, because of that selfless outpouring at the root of our very being, we trust God. And the challenge for any believer in a God of that kind is whether we can, in some small measure, so reflect that selfless outpouring that we may be trustworthy and trust, in turn, neighbor and stranger.

Clearly, Williams is sketching a theology of God as impassible and a doctrine of creation ex nihilo -- positions that have both, and I think rightly, been challenged across a range of theological positions, most especially in Catherine Keller's The Face of the Deep and John Caputo's Weakness of God. But setting such metaphysical matters aside, what Merton and Williams share, I suggest, is a profound recognition of how peripatetic modern life can be, which they wed to an image of the Divine as that in which one might place one's full trust when all else seems precarious and overwhelming. The God in whom this trust is placed is said to be a God on whom the believer can lean. Against the despair prompted by the falling away of worldly security, Merton and Williams offer the outpouring of sheer gift. Belief, far from being mere propositional content, thus becomes a modality of action: to believe is to abide in the Other. Our trustworthiness is thus a product of our having already trusted another. Or, as Merton elsewhere writes in Thoughts in Solitude: "Your life is shaped by the ends you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire" (p. 49).

Other Links of Interest:

A Life of Toils & Vigils: Innocent III and the Phenomenality of Research

2010-02-21T18:23:00.003-06:00

Brevis sit et vana huius seculi fallax gloria

Brief and empty is the deceptive glory of this world

-- Jacques de Vitry.

We are never what we are; something different is always possible.
-- John D. Caputo

One of the most popular texts during the medieval period was Pope Innocent III's (d. 1216) On the Misery of the Human Condition (De miseria humanae conditionis), which dates to the 1190s. The text repeatedly confronts its readers with the absolute and, for Innocent, abject mortality of earthly existence. For Innocent, "man was formed out of earth, conceived in guilt, born to punishment. What he does is depraved and illicit, is shameful and improper, vain and unprofitable. He will become fuel for the eternal fires, food for worms, a mass of rottenness." In an effort "to make [his] explanation clearer and ... fuller," Innocent elaborates with apparent relish:

Man was formed of dust, slime, and ashes; what is even more vile, of the filthiest seed. He was conceived from the itch of the flesh, in the heat of passion and the stench of lust, and worse yet, with the stain of sin. He was born to toil, dread, and trouble; and more wretched still, was born only to die. He commits depraved acts by which he offends God, his neighbor, and himself, shameful acts by which he defiles his name, his person, and his conscience; and vain acts by which he ignores all things important, useful, and necessary. He will become fuel for those fires which are forever hot and burn forever bright; food for the worm which forever nibbles and digests; a mass of rottenness which will forever stink and reek….

But before we write Innocent off as a hater of all things fleshly, before, that is, we issue against him some dualist insult, we might pause and reflect on what it is that Innocent''s apparent "misery" at human life targets. Here the corruptible nature of the human body serves to frame a more general concern for the proper comportment of earthly life. Like the slightly later tradition of the ars moriendi and even to some extent the mid-twentieth-century theological notion of a "fundamental option" (most commonly associated with the German Jesuit Karl Rahner) or for that matter certain Heideggerian and Gadamarian ideas about facticity and situatedness, to be acutely aware of our finitude allows us, at least potentially, to live with a greater sense of the importance and weightiness of what we do now. But also its absolute contingency, for things can be otherwise. Our place on the Wheel of Fortune will be altered.

But one passage in particular strikes me as remarkable resonant. Here Innocent calls his readers to remember what might called a constitutive non-knowability characterizing the factical life of scholarship:

For although a researcher must toil through many vigils and keep vigils over his toils, there is hardly anything so cheap and easy that a man can understand it fully and clearly, unless perhaps he knows for sure that nothing is known for sure. This may seem an unresolvable contradiction. But why? "For the corruptible body is a load upon the soul, and the earthly habitation presses down upon the mind that muses on many things" [Ecclesiastes 8:16-17]. Hear what Solomon says about this: "All things are hard; man cannot explain them by word" [Ps. 63:7-8].

What I find so remarkable about this brief passage is how it powerfully articulates the difficulties of a scholarly life. These are not merely or only existential difficulties, but are somehow structural -- perhaps even ontological. Innocent writes about how "a researcher must toil through many vigils and keep vigils over his toils." This chiasmus between toiling and vigiling is so necessary because our ability to know is so constitutively flawed, impotent. From a theological position, this inability to know -- whether fully or accurately -- might, following Augustine, be declared a necessary condition of postlapsarian existence. Original Sin, in an Augustinian frame, has inescapably cognitive consequences. (I think this is a feature that Milton deftly weaves into his Paradise Lost.) But still we press on, still we toil in our vigils, still we keep vigil over our toils. Innocent here sounds to my ears remarkably like John Caputo in More Radical Hermeneutics: On Not Knowing Who We Are: "We are driven by the passion of non-knowing" (p. 3). But in that same passion -- brimming with its unique difficulties, replete with its own anxieties and calamities -- we are able to hear a certain tonality of hope and expectation. Caputo again, from his still beautiful essay on Foucault: "For our being human spins off into an idefinite future about which we know little or nothing, which fills us with a little hope and not a little anxiety, a future to come for which there is no program, no preparation, no prognostication" (p. 36).

With Innocent, we see that, in whatever else it might consist, the phenomenality of scholarship rests precisely in its hylomorphic qualities. Life is hard, and we have to work hard to get it right: so Aristotle wrote, Solomon confessed, and Caputo channeled. But the life about which we speak is a life which unfolds in unseen directions, and it is this Deleuzian impersonality that might enable us to think our lives otherwise. As Amy Hollywood writes in the close pages of Sensible Ecstasy: "What is required is a resolute attempt to think the body otherwise, as the site of possibility and limitation, pleasure and suffering, natality and death, for all human beings in all our multiplicity and diversity" (p. 186).

For the texts from Innocent, I have used the translation by Margaret M. Dietz (Indianapolis: Library of Liberal Arts/Bobbs-Merrill, 1969).

The Works of Friendship

2010-02-19T02:08:00.162-06:00

updated Tuesday, April 6, 2010: additions to Ben Dunning and Diane Davis; NEW listings on Samuel Baker and two of my fellow Yale alums, Michael Milton and Tyler Wigg-Stevenson.

It seems altogether fitting that my first real post of 2010 should be one that reflects on the accomplishments achieved by others during the last year. This post, which was mostly composed back in early January but has remained buried because of more pressing personal matters, chronicles the works of friends that have appeared in print. Because the theme of friendship has once again proven to be so existentially poignant for me, I will save the unpacking of my titular terms for another post.

Daniel Joslyn-Siemiatkoski, a medievalist and church historian, has published Christian Memories of the Maccabean Martyrs, based on his Boston College dissertation (see here for an extended preview). Among other virtues, Daniel's study employs a postcolonial analysis keyed to an historian's sensitivity to the particular and contingent so as to illuminate more deeply certain patterns of medieval Christian identity- and culture-making.

Benjamin Dunning, a specialist in New Testament and Early Christian literatures, published Aliens and Sojourners: Self as Other in Early Christianity in UPenn's magnificent series Divinations, along with two articles in the Journal of Early Christian Studies and the Journal of Religion related to his next book project on, as he describes it, the "theological significance of sexual difference and gendered embodiment in second- and third-century Christian thought." The articles are: "What Sort of Thing Is This Luminous Woman? Thinking Sexual Difference in On the Origin of the World," Journal of Early Christian Studies 17.1 (2009): 55-84; and "Virgin Earth, Virgin Birth: Creation, Sexual Difference, and Recapitulation in Irenaeus of Lyons," Journal of Religion 89.1 (2009): 57-88.

Susannah Chewing's edited collection The Milieu and Context of the Wooing Group appeared in the series "Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages" from the University of Wales Press (American distributor, University of Chicago Press).

Nathan Mitchell, a scholar of longstanding note in the history and theology of Christian liturgy, published The Mystery of the Rosary: Marian Devotion and the Reinvention of Catholicism (excerpts available via the link and here on Google books). Nathan seeks to "account for the rosary's ubiquity, durability, and resilience" as a popular devotion that cuts across a diversity of spectra and historical continua. But his aim is not to offer a "positivist history" of the devotion; rather, his a hermeneuetical enterprise, seeking "to understand how what happened continues to shape human experience." He states his argument clearly: "to understand the rosary's adaptability and survival across chronological periods, cultures, and continents one must examine more closely the changes Catholicism itself began to experience after the Reformation...and the Council of Trent." Importantly, he demonstrates how, contrary to certain popular historiographies, "Catholicism after Trent did not become a fossilized, monolithic institution immune to change." For Nathan, "the rosary survived and flourished because it was able to absorb the reframings of reform, representation, ritual, religious identity, and devotion tha came to characterize early modern Catholicism and that have continued to shape Catholic piety and practice to the present day." From the outset, Nathan whispers what I take to be two axioms that ought to govern any inquiry into historical Catholicism: (a) "a reform of church life is inevitably a reform of its images as these are framed in its icons, its rites, and its written narratives"; and (b) "Catholics have maintained traditions of belief and behavior not through single-minded intransigence but by embracing flexibility and change." See here for a brief video excerpt of Nathan discussing the sacramental theology of Vatican II, the sacraments of faith more generally, and how through sacrament Christians are committed to social justice. Nathan also continues to write his extraordinary column, the "Amen Corner," for the liturgical studies journal Worship.

As its editor, Nicola Masciandaro successfully shepherded the inaugural issue of the new journal Glossator into existence. The issue was replete with outstanding contributions, but I especially draw attention (given the rubric under which I am writing) to Daniel C. Remein's exquisite essay in what I would have to call a combinatorial poetics (i.e., combining his scholarly work with his poetry and creative writing -- although I am well aware that the distinction I'm making between the two is utterly arbitrary), and the collaborative piece by Nicola and Anna Klosowska, who also collaborated with Bryan Reynolds on a chapter in the latter's new book, Transversal Subjects. See here for Dan's blog. And Nicola's essay "Becoming Spice: Commentary as Geophilosophy" has now appeared in Collapse VI: Geo/Philosophy .

Eileen Joy's essay "'In His Eyes Stood a Light note Beautiful': Levinas, Hospitality, Beowolf," appeared in the volume Levinas and Medieval Literature: The "Difficult Reading" of English and Rabbinic Texts. The essay can also be read here.

It is impossible to chart the many scholarly iterations of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (there are, in fact, no less than three webpages [see here and here for the other two] for him as well as the group blog In the Middle) but I will note that he contributed a chapter on lithic memory to the already well-received collection, The Post-Historical Middle Ages [see below]. Ever the active blogger, JJC has also listed what he considers to be his top 20 posts of 2009, a year that also marks the end of his run as department chair [see also here and here].

Cary Howie contributed the chapter "Superficial Medievalism and the Queer Futures of Film" to the collection Queer Movie Medievalisms. Cary blogs intermittently, but always beautifully, at Mended Things.

In addition to his many book reviews, Aaron Klink authored the chapter "Knowledge Seeking Wisdom: Medical Professionals, Religion and End of Life Care" in volume 1 of Religion, Death, and Dying, ed., Lucy Bregman (Praeger Press). Aaron also delivered a subtle but riotously funny paper on the queer theological work of James Alison at the American Academy of Religion's annual meeting in Montreal. My favorite moment in the talk -- alongside Aaron's various Lutheran testimonials -- was when he reminded the audience that, while the American Lutherans were discussing the issue of blessing same-sex unions at their annual synod back in June, a tornado hit. For the "conservatives," this was clearly an act of Divine judgment against those who would wish to bless such unions. Meanwhile, the "liberal" faction, upon their victory, claimed hermeneutical superiority by retrospectively interpreting the tornado as the presence of the Holy Spirit!

Two individuals with ties to the UT Austin English Department graduate program have also been active. Bradley J. Irish, who specializes in Tudor literature and history, published "'The Secret Chamber and the Other Suspect Places': Materiality, Space, and the Fall of Catherine Howard" in Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 4 (2009), pp. 169-74. Brad also gave papers at several important conferences, including one entitled "Surrey, Richmond and the Poetics of Ambivalence," at Hampton Court Palace for an international gathering on "Henry VIII and the Tudor Court, 1509-2009." He closed out the year by delivering an MLA paper. Sebastian Langdell's "‘What world is this? How vndirstande am I?’A reappraisal of poetic authority in Thomas Hoccleve’s Series" appeared in Medium Aevum 78.2 (2009).

The year also closed with Brian P. Flanagan receiving his first book contract for what is surely to be an impressive systematic treatment of the ecclesiology of the Dominican theologian Jean-Marie Tillard (1927-2000); the volume is forthcoming in 2010 from Continuum/T&T Clark. See here for an abstract of Brian's 2007 Boston College dissertation. Brian, who now teaches at Marymount University (Arlington, VA), has also authored an essay on the use ecclesial metaphors in the College Theology Society's journal Horizons. A member of that wonderful Society since 2002, he was just elected to a term on its board as Treasurer. In his bid for that position, Brian wrote that his "research and experience have confirmed...the fundamental importance of opening spaces for community among all of us in our otherness to each other, and [his desire] the Society’s tradition of openness to our sometimes cacophonous, sometimes harmonious, voices." In addition to Brian's above mentioned work on Tillard, those interested might also consult Christopher Ruddy's recent book length study, The Local Church: Tillard and the Future of Catholic Ecclesiology.

Finally, two former colleagues of mine (among the very many who have gone off to do interesting and much needs things) from Yale Divinity School have been doing very noteworthy work. The Rev. Tyler Wigg-Stevenson '04 M.Div, who recently founded the Two Futures Project for the abolition of all nuclear weapons, was interviewed in October 2009 for the PBS show "Religion and Ethics Newsweekly" (see here and here). Tyler is also the author of the provocative 2007 book Brand Jesus: Christianity in a Consumerist Age, the germination for which, he notes, was a term paper in a YDS exegesis course on Paul's Letter to the Romans. Mr. Michael Milton '03 MAR, who now resides in Austin, TX, and has spent much of his professional career in nonprofit fundraising and development, published Head First Data Analysis in August 2009. For more on this, check out his blog. Michael also has a forthcoming book on Excel. I'm excited to hear about his several other writing projects, too.

Writing in his preface to Gilles Deleuze's ABCs: The Folds of Friendship, Charles Stivale observes how "friendship is not, and indeed cannot be, one single type of practice in all instances" (p. ix). Through a series of carefully executed readings of Deleuze's writings, Stivale produces a "zig-zag methodology" imminent to the work itself. Most important for the purposes of this post is what Stivale says about how the "different tonalities and diverse forms of affect [that] are precipitated within the teaching exchange" can fold into friendship (p. 35). In Stivale's ex-pli-cation of Deleuze, we learn that "what is interesting in a course is much less its subject than its emotion....[that] it's not a question of following everything or of listening to everything, but of keeping watch so that one grasps what suits him or her at the right moment" (p. 40). To be studious in this Deleuzian sense is to be watchful, which is a pensively productive vector of desire. The pedagogical charge, Stivale later remarks, isn't to found (or to find "false security" within) so-called 'schools of thoughts'; rather, it is for students to "seize...[particular] notions in movement, twist them in their own way, and use these concepts and notions as needed" (p. 42). Just as Deleuze practiced in his own pedagogy, a teacher's task is "that of a mediator to the students' varied movements of comprehension and experimentation as a relay in the capacities of affect" (p. 42). It is in keeping with the force of this thinking that I wish also to make mention of and celebrate the work of some teachers, past and present:

Appearing late in 2009 was David H. Kelsey's decades-in-the-making magnum opus, Eccentric Existence, which is a highly anticipated two-volume, 1100-page constructive account of Christian theological anthropology. See here to listen to a 30-minute radio conversation with David about the book. While the interviewers can be a bit annoying, what comes through clearly here is how amazingly subtle a thinker David is. One thing David speaks about in the interview is his own transition from writing about theology to doing theology, and, although he values both operations, this is a transition that he has consistently encouraged his students to pursue. On a personal note, I had the immense pleasure of taking several seminars with David, now retired, while I attended Yale Divinity School, and he also served as my adviser for a period. He remains for me a model scholar not only in his erudition, but, most importantly, in the care, generosity, and humility that exudes from his person. (David also wrote a detailed review essay on "Theology in the University: Once More, with Feeling," that appeared in Modern Theology 25.2, and which examines the recent books by Gavin D'Costa, Andrew Shanks, and Stanley Hauerwas on theology and the modern university. Theological education is also a topic dear to David's heart, one on which he has previously written thoughtful and widely praised ruminations.)

One of my undergraduate professors, moral and systematic theologian David Matzko McCarthy (who has also produced creative essays on sexuality and queer theology), edited a remarkable volume, The Heart of Catholic Social Teaching: Its Origins and Contemporary Significance, all of whose contributors are faculty of my alma mater, Mount St. Mary's University (Emmitsburg, MD). It is a collection that arises from the "collaborative habits of a real community of teacher-scholars, philosophers and theologians who live in the same place and talk to each other about the general education program in which they all work." That back-cover endorsement is from the pen of another of my early teachers, William Portier, who, after nearly 30 years of teaching at The Mount (as we call it) took up a position at the University of Dayton.

Palgrave published Elizabeth Scala's co-edited volume, The Post-Historic al Middle Ages. The book and its many amazing essays (including one on lithic memory by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen) has been already been referenced several times with great interest by the folks over at ITM, and there was quite the buzz surrounding it at last May's Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo -- a buzz connected with phrases like "paradigm-changing" despite Palgrave only having one copy on display and no promotional materials of speak to speak. Wordisms offers a few nice thoughts on the book, especially a series of provocative remarks on Liz's chapter, "The Gender of Historicism." Liz also published an article on Chaucer's Wife's and Clerk's Tales in the 2009 volume of the annual Studies in the Age of Chaucer.

Another UT Austin medievalist, Daniel Birkholz, contributed a chapter on "Biography After Historicism" to the above volume, The Post-Historical Middle Ages, and his latest article on the Harley Lyrics appeared in the 2009 annual volume of Studies in the Age of Chaucer. He was also awarded a Solmsen Post-Doctoral Fellowship for the 2009-2010 academic year.

A specialist in Romanticism, Samuel Baker has "Scott’s Stoic Characters: Ethics, Sentiment, and Irony in The Antiquary, Guy Mannering, and ‘the Author of Waverly’" in a special issue of MLQ 70:4, pp. 443-71. In this essay, Baker revisits the claims to a "split [Walter] Scott," or that "picture of him as an author who, torn apart, knits himself back together in a powerful (if perhaps inflexible) corpus." Aiming "less to add details to this picture than to bring its central figure into sharper focus," Baker sets out asking "[b]y what virtue did Scott, who seems to us so contradictory, project a meaningful character." For Baker, the answer presents itself in a particular form of stoic philosophizing in which the self was "virtuous enough to be sentimental." Not only does this article offer a compelling portrait of Scott’s "character types," but signals a more explicit concern on its author’s part with the affective dimensions of literary culture-making. This essay is part of a series that Baker is publishing on what he describes in his faculty bio as "ethical dispositions in the Romantic novel, , tracking how stoicism and skepticism, among other attitudes, ceased to refer to specific philosophical schools and began to be seen as general psychological orientations." Baker, who previously worked as a journalist and book reviewer prior to taking his PhD, has also written a lengthy piece on the “maritime georgic” (see ELH 75 [2008], pp. 531-63), and this previews some of the ideas in his forthcoming book, Written on the Water: British Romanticism and the Maritime Empire of Culture. He has been involved with Harrington Fellow program at UT’s Harry Ransom Center, where is was one of the coordinators of the symposium, "Seaborne Renaissance: Global Exchanges and Religion in Early Modernity."

Diane Davis published Reading Ronell, an excellent edited collection on the work of Avital Ronell, featuring contributions by Judith Butler, Jean-Luc Nancy, Sam Weber, and Hent de Vries, among several others. In her introduction, Diane describes any project with the "mission" announced in this book's title as an "arduous task": "How might one approach an oeuvre explicitly designed to 'resist you,' to get 'you' to question what it means to read anything at all? To open a work by Avital Ronell is, in a sense, to eavesdrop on a fundamentally dissymetrical Conversation in which 'your' addresser is first of all an addressee occupying a space of troubled reception." Ronell's work palpably thematizes the call of the Other, where writing itself is always already (in me quoting Diane quoting Ronell) "at the behest of another." That volume's aim is, tropologically speaking, to enable us to "perk up our ears" and hone our auditory abilities in order to meet the demands of "Ronell's exquisitely (and excruciatingly) meticulous readings [that] orchestrate, each time, a depropriating encounter with the inassimilable....Reading at the extreme limits of responsibility (response-ability), Ronell enacts an ethics of reading that responds to the trace of the other while tirelessly demonstrating that there is no way, ultimately, to have understood (completely)." Both Diane and her contributors thus attempt to respond through an "expansive and diverse assemblage of essays" to the "singular provocation of Ronell's 'remarkable critical oeurve' -- the devastating insights, the unprecedented writing style, the relentless destabilizations -- [that] is a function of her ethics and practice of reading." The volume, moreover, is itself described as a somewhat belated response of the editor (a calling in on a self-made promissory note) to a 1994 special fifty page section on Ronell (edited by Jonathan Culler) in the journal diacritics. Unlike that issue, which Diane nicely observes "fascinatingly display[s]" the "sort of competitive mimesis" that the Ronellian style apparently inspires, this volume sets out to be "an assemblage...les given to mimetic impulses and more interested in reading with Ronell: by reading Ronell reading, or by examining the ethico-political implications of her radical dislocations, or by carefully explicating, extending, and exploring the paraconcepts addressed in her works." It is equally worth mentioning, as Diane herself does near the close of her introduction, "one profound regret": that Ronell's great teacher, Derrida, who expressed his eagerness to participate," passed before he was able to complete his contribution to the volume. As Diane recalls, "At his home in Rise-Orangis one afternoon in late 2005, when he was already quite ill, he again expressed to me his enthusiasm for this collection and his sincere hope to complete his contribution to it. I am extremely grateful to Derrida for his unwavering encouragement, and I want to mark his disseminated presence in these pages: though he could not complete his essay, he did contribute a great deal to this collection."

Although previously announced for a 2009 release, the much anticipated Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the Poetria Nova across Medieval and Renaissance Europe by Marjorie Curry Woods is now scheduled for release in 2010. It should be available at OSUP booth during Kalamazoo, and I anticipate a future post about the volume upon its publication.

I'm also happy to report that, while visiting him with him in April, Dale B. Martin, a noted scholar of New Testament and ancient Christianity, awoke to find himself elected to the prestigious American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Interested parties can also watch Dale's lectures from his Spring 2009 Yale undergraduate introductory course on the New Testament. Technically speaking, of course, I was never a student of Dale's while I attended Yale, since I never enrolled in any of his courses. But in other, more important respects, I remain indebted to him for not only his many kindnesses but especially the consistently provocative nature of his challenges. One of the first memories I have getting to know Dale entails the both of us walking in a late night rain after a choral rehearsal. We were discussing his book, The Corinthian Body, which I had just started reading; I was communicating to him my then frustrations about what he meant by the social construction of identity, informing him that I was (at that stage) too committed to some kind of post-Heideggerian notion a substantial self (however hermeneutically ridden) to make the leap into social construction. In his typically Texan way, Dale declared me "too damn conservative" before hopping in his car. I was, to say the least, dumbstruck, since I had never thought of myself as conservative in nearly any way (nor had I been considered conservative while attending my college). Although nothing is ever predictable with Dale, I say "typical" only because of his continual ability to compel -- very often with a single, well placed remark/rejoinder -- an entire rethinking of one's position. In my case, that rethinking lead far behind a simple position on some academic issue; it brought about an entirely new relation to the world and my place in it. Because of his influence, I can point to the exact moment (some time later, in a course on martyrdom and traditions of noble death with Adela Collins) when I became a self-consciously aware postmodernist. Of course, some might lament such influence, but I revel in its devilishness.

I am also eagerly anticipating the continuing unfolding of this new year as it will bring into print the work of Douglas R. Boin (a specialist in classical Latin and the literatures and material cultures of Christian late antiquity), whose UT Ph.D. is still so newly minted that it shines. He will publish articles in the Journal of Roman Studies and the American Journal of Archaeology. Doug also presented papers on late antique Ostia, the principle site of his research, at international gatherings in Rome and Philadelphia. See here for more on his activities and global sojourns.

OOO, ya don't say?

2010-01-31T15:21:00.002-06:00

Follow this link to learn more about a one-day symposium on April 23rd at Georgia Tech on Object Oriented Ontology [OOO, as the shorthand now goes].

According to the symposium website, OOO, a term coined by Graham Hartman, who is also the figure most associated with this philosophical movement, "puts things at the center....Its proponents contend that nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally—plumbers, cotton, bonobos, DVD players, and sandstone, for example. In contemporary thought, things are usually taken either as the aggregation of ever smaller bits (scientific naturalism) or as constructions of human behavior and society (social relativism). OOO steers a path between the two, drawing attention to things at all scales (from atoms to alpacas, bits to blinis), and pondering their nature and relations with one another as much with ourselves." Among the scheduled participants, Levi Bryant has written a series of manifestos for the movement, available here and here. For another such manifesto, see Ian Bogust, who is also the webmaster for the symposium. Bogust's post also connects with the early January f(l)ury over the present sordid state of the humanities (i.e., as registered at MLA '09 and thereafter).

I still haven't taken a position on OOO myself yet, but I find something in and about it compelling, not least it's thoroughly ontological de-centering of the human. What probably bothers me most is its repeated claims to some form of "realism," especially insofar as OOO finds comrades in "speculative realism" (e.g., Ray Brassier, Ian Hamilton Grant, and Quentin Meillassoux). Indeed, Hartman is very much the shifting figure associated with both movements, and at least in some readings, OOO is a sub-field of "speculative realism" (see here, e.g.) As always, it would be interesting to trace the intellectual genealogy that these thinkers claim for themselves (e.g., behind Hartman there stands a certain acknowledged influence of his teacher Alphonso Lingis), including an important (revisionist?) reading of Deleuze. Indeed, Levi Bryant and Steven Shaviro have probably written the most on Deleuze in relation to this question, although I wonder how Manuel DeLanda's reading of Delueze as putting forth a "realist ontology" might connect with OOO more generally. It's also worth thinking about how, at least in the circles of literary criticism, something like "thing theory" works in conjunction with OOO, although I don't think that the former posits any kind of realism, ontologically understood.

CFP: Inaugural Issue of "Speculations"

2010-01-22T18:36:00.005-06:00

The below CFP, first posted in December, is for a new online journal, Speculations: The Journal of Object Oriented Ontology. While I don't share its apparent alliance to "speculative realism," I am interested in new forums for the renewed study of "ontology" and the exploration of "post-continental philosophy" (a neologism whose usage I'm only familiar with through the work of John Mullarkey).

Speculations: The Journal of Object Oriented Ontology

CALL FOR PAPERS

Speculations invites articles on topics related to object oriented philosophy, speculative realism or post-continental philosophy for its inaugural issue. Articles should not exceed 8000 words and should conform to the author’s guidelines outlined on the website. Submissions can be sent electronically via the journal website or directly to the following e-mail address: speculationsjournal@gmail.com

Speculations is an open-access peer-reviewed journal. The deadline for submissions is February 28th 2010. Issue one is due to be published in early 2010 and will include submissions from Graham Harman, Ian Bogost and Levi Byrant.

Website: http://speculationsjournal.org
Inquiries and submissions can be sent to: speculationsjournal@gmail.com

For further information contact:
Paul John Ennis (Editor): paul.ennis@ucdconnect.ie

CFP: MLA 2011 -- "Emotion at the Renaissance Court"

2010-01-09T17:37:00.003-06:00

The following CFP information has been making its way around the blogosphere and has already been posted on the UPenn site, but I wanted to do my part to support a colleague's work. The session organizer, Brad Irish, is a UT Austin doctoral student specializing in Tudor literature and history. He also just successfully delivered a paper at the 2009 MLA conference. The title of this proposed session keys directly into his own dissertation research on "powerful feelings" at the Tudor Court.

Emotion at the Renaissance Court, MLA 2011
(January 6-9, 2011; Los Angeles)

Proposed special session seeks papers considering emotion and affect in the early modern courtly sphere. The emotional life of a courtier, emotional displays at court, emotion in courtly literature, etc. Abstracts by Mar. 2 to Bradley J. Irish (birish@mail.utexas.edu).

CFP: Boston College Philosophy Grad Conference on "Power"

2010-01-05T16:09:00.007-06:00

Take note that the deadline (January 19th) for Boston College's 11th Annual Graduate Student Conference is fast approaching. The conference dates will be March 19-20, 2010. Please recognize that the January 19th deadline is for the submission of completed papers (4000 words maximum). For those not accustomed to this procedure, it's a pretty standard activity for academic philosophy conferences (e.g., it's the only way to get on the annual program at SPEP). It is, quite literally, a call for papers. The theme for this year's conference is "Power." Here's the description the organizers offer:

The formation of states, violent revolutions, and peaceful elections all show power's influence on human events. Philosophers traditionally have examined the dynamics of power as part of understanding social and political affairs. Other thinkers have called our attention to power as a hidden force in human life. Beyond government and politics, they argue, power quietly determines social institutions and culture -- even knowledge itself.

What is the fundamental meaning of power? How is it structured and what is its mode of operation? What moral responsibility do we have with respect to the powerful and the powerless?

We invite papers that consider how these and other questions concerning power have been address in the history of philosophy as well as what contemporary philosophy can contribute to the discussion.

Among the conference's three keynote addresses will be BC's own James Bernauer (a long-time scholar of Foucault and Arendt), Francisco de Roux, a Columbian Jesuit economist, social activist, and human rights advocate.

Palinochio Take the Prize

2009-12-22T14:01:00.013-06:00

(updated: 12/27/09)

As reported yesterday by Countdown's regular fill-in host Lawrence O'Donnell, Sarah Palin has garnered the "Best Life of the Year Award" from Politifact for her outrageous and morally repulsive Facebook falsity about "death panels." In the segment below, O'Donnell discusses the runners-up (including the nonsensical "birther queen" Orly Taitz and the conspiracy-finding idiocy of Glenn Beck) with Margaret Carlson of Bloomberg News. Carlson puts it appropriately, saying: "We live in a time when...politicians are not just entitled to their own opinions. They're entitled to their own facts."

So, because the embedded video from MSNBC won't stay up,
here's the link to the segment. Let me know if it stops working, and I'll correct it.

CFPs: Politics and Waiting, Deleuze and Ethics, Foucault and Animals

2009-12-20T09:56:00.006-06:00

Check out these really interesting CFPs. The first two are for conferences; the second is for a book project.

Waiting for the Political Moment: June 17-19, 2010 in Rotterdam and Utrecht (deadline: January 4, 2010)
Deleuze: Ethics and Politics - April 9-10, 2010 at Purdue University (deadline: January 15, 2010)
Foucault and Animals - This is a call for abstracts for collection of essays to be edited by Matthew Chrulew and Dinesh Wadiwel. Deadline: February 28, 2010 (500-word abstract); the accepted essay, sometime in late 2010.

From Dickens to Obermann: "With Growing Amazement and Multiplying Anger the True State of Our Healthcare"

2009-12-20T00:01:00.010-06:00

For several months now, MSNBC's Keith Obermann has focused his journalistic eye with laser-like precision on the debates -- and more often, nonsense -- surrounding health care reform efforts, including and up to this week's ongoing debacle of a Senate bill. I have previously lifted up as essential to any thoughtful member of "The Left" (however self-designated membership within its roster may be) Obermann's commentatorial work. Some of my friends like to chide me by saying that Obermann is very often is too seduced by his own rhetoric and presumptive critical voice, citing as the most egregious example of such self-seduction his ongoing usage of Edward R. Murrow's (in)famous tag, "good night, and good luck." I make no recoil when hearing such an attempted rebuke; instead, I embrace it. We need more commentators with the journalistic integrity and social conscience of an Edward Murrow -- a list on which I would happily and proudly append the names of both Keith Obermann and Rachel Maddow.

What I find most powerful in Obermann's commentary on the (failed and failing) attempts at health care reform is the passion of his rhetoric: he speaks not only from the heart of an American social conscience, but most poingantly from the heart of one who has experienced and seen the worry and hurt and sorrow and pain of this country's health care system. It is for this reason that I wish to encourage everyone to listen to the hour-long "special comment" he offered back in October. His words are as vital to hear now as they were more than two months ago. There is so much I could say about his remarks: about how they left me nearly tearing up as they compelled me to recall what it was like four years ago dealing with the doctors at the bedside of my own dying brother. But such reflections must still wait, their rawness still too new even after so much time as passed and the extraordinary comfort of so many has been offered.

I think it's also appropriate for us to recall this comment now for two additional reasons: medievalists will not fail to hear Obermann putting to productive use an analogy with the English Courts of Chancery, and literary critics will not fail to attend to Obermann's powerful evocation of the Victorian era's social conscience, Charles Dickens, and his beloved (and today overly sentimentalized) novella A Christmas Carol, which was published on 19 December 1843.

Embedded below is only the first six minutes of Obermann's commentary. See here to watch the remaining parts, or here to stream the entire episode.

"Do NO Harm": Or, How Health Care Reform Has Been Perverted to Benefit the American Insurance Cartel

2009-12-18T04:59:00.022-06:00

updated: 12/18/09 at 6pm CST

This will be my first attempt at imbeding videos, but I wanted to share Keith Obermann's December 16th, 2009, special comment on the perverted efforts at health care reform. I rally behind Obermann, who, along with Rachel Maddow, remain for me the single best, most thoughtful, most journalistically authentic, and rhetorically sensitive of commentators -- along with them being among the most compelling voices we now have on "The Left" (whatever such a construct can mean in an America always and seemingly forever suspicious of such a thing). Yes, I'm a proud Leftie!

Note also the brief posts on the "kill the bill" movement at Critical Animal and An und fur sich

Kvond on Massumi: Inspired and Inspiring

2009-12-18T03:53:00.008-06:00

updated: 12/18/09 at 6pm CST

Check out the really interesting series of posts on Brian Massumi's Parables of the Virtual over at Frames/Sing. This Deleuzian inspired book -- which is also inspiring, I think -- is also notoriously difficult. I think part of this difficulty (equally a pleasure in itself) stems from one of the strongest of Deleuzian thought-forms, which Massumi (our Deleuze translator par excellence) has clearly absorbed: namely, Deleuze's habit (welcome, I think) of stating/positing something to be the case (i.e., a particular ontological relation, or idea, etc.) and considering what flows from that position/statement. This Deleuzian concern for exploring/creating (rather than arguing stricto sensu for) concepts/relations can be disconcerting for many readers who might otherwise desire a constant relay between supposedly proven condition(al)s. To desire such a dialectics, we might say (with/alongside Deleuze), is already to be captured by those sedimented forms of intellection operative under the cultural rubric of "common sense." It is to disturb and compel us away from such thoughtless complacencies that so much of Deleuze's writings aim. Because I think Massumi's text equally targets these forms of "state philosophy," we are especially indebted to Kvond for offering such beautiful and generative -- generative because beautiful, but also beautifully generative -- postings. So far, we have the following topics:

UC, Riverside & "The Disorder of Things"

2009-12-17T01:18:00.008-06:00

A friend just informed me about this multi-year event at UC, Riverside. Check out the link here. It really looks like an amazing series of conferences and symposia.

Here's an excerpt from their site describing the project:

"The Disorder of Things: Predisciplinarity and the Divisions of Knowledge 1660-1850" is an international research network led by the University of California, Riverside and Birkbeck, University of London. Over two years the network will meet with scholars from a wide range of disciplines to discuss pre-disciplinary forms of knowledge through cultural practices, sites, texts, and objects, from 1660-1850. Interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches have provided creative impetus for rethinking our fields in recent years. While twenty-first century discussions of disciplinarity are often presentist in their relative neglect of historical shifts, narratives of the emergence of disciplines tend to establish teleologies of increasing professionalization, which appear to lead inexorably to our present configurations. Drawing on these well established academic critiques of the rise of disciplinarity and of current disciplinary crises, we will shift the ground of debate to a longer time frame and a wider scope in order to generate new insights into what may seem like teleological dead ends or inevitabilities today.

Friday (if tardy) Florilegium

2009-12-15T15:55:00.009-06:00

Because the last few days got away from me, I was able to post these on Friday. So, dear reader, below you will find not only some interesting links from last week, but also a few from the beginning of this one. Here follows a few internet garlands for your enjoyment ....

The discussion of Philip Goodchild's book Theology of Money is now officially over. Since I've previously provided links, here are the remaining ones: See these links for parts six, seven, and eight, along with the conclusion, an author's response, and a few final thoughts by discussion organizer Anthony Paul Smith, who also provides a full listing of the links to all the previous parts.
Over at ITM, Karl Steel offers two posts: one about working on "syllabus building" during the mid-winter break, and another briefly noting two books, Ann Rice's Angel Time and Carly Phillips' The Nature of the Blood.
Nicola Masciandaro on The Whim offers a catena and text on "Anti-Cosmos: Black Mahapralaya."
See The Immanent Frame for a very thoughtful and demographically rich post on the so-called rise of the self-identified 'no religionists," entitled, "Who Has 'Religion'?"
And Kvond has yet another lovely post, this time on Brian Massumi's Parables of the Virtual.

That's it for now, but more to come later in the week. Also, putting the final touches on the second part of my post on Judith Butler. Look for that, my promised conference report, and some other items before the week's end.

New Directions In Queer Studies: Conference Keynote by Heather Love

2009-12-08T22:10:00.023-06:00

Today, I'll be participating in what is surely to be a wonderful experience: a one-day conference on "new directions in queer studies." See here for the complete schedule, including an abstract of the keynote address. It is the direct result of a Prof. Ann Cvetkovich's graduate course of the same name, from which all of its presenters also come. So I'm excited to hear papers by my fellow graduate students not only from the English Department but across the university, too. The entire conference, as I understand it, was also planned and carried out by the students, and this in lieu of the more traditional end of semester seminar papers. Prof. Lisa Moore, another queer studies scholar at UT Austin and a specialist in sapphic genres of the eighteenth century, has also enabled such alternative pedagogical practices.

Although I do have some reservations about a few particulars in these formats (and here's not the occasion for such diatribe), I think such alternative pedagogies are vitally important, not least in their professionalizing capacities and recognition that the traditional seminar paper is probably least useful for most of today's graduate students in contrast to other potential areas for developing analyses and arguments (e.g., construction of syllabi, conference papers, book reviews, etc.)

The day will end with a much anticipated keynote by Prof. Heather Love (see here for her personal webpage), who will speak on the "queer routes of upward mobility." Love is the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard, 2007), an elegant and powerful study -- part literary analysis, part exquisite meditation -- on what Michael Sne diker called in his GLQ "Books in Brief" review the "non-transparency of negativity." The book has justly received many accolades (see here for a sampling of its many endorsements). Back in July, The Feminist Review had this to say about Love's book. Late last week, I offered a brief Facebook status update, saying that the most arresting aspect of any literary critic's work is the degree to which she compels her readers to re/turn to the texts under consideration. I'm now enthralled with the texts Love reads by Walter Pater and Willa Cather in ways that I have never been before. With grace and tenderness, Love contests what she most recently terms the "compulsory happiness" operative within queer existence, which, by means of its "climate of emotional conformism," obdurates other forms of queer living, not least in the post-Stonewall gay and lesbian movement's failure to attend to the persistent complexity of pyschic shame. Any effort to recalibrate the categories by which queer existence today might be made more livable must turn backward to a negative archive of "shyness, ambivalence, failure, melancholia, loneliness, regression, victimhood, heart-break, antimodernity, immaturity, self-hatred, despair, shame" (Feeling Backward, p. 146 and passim).

I'm hoping to provide some post-conference thoughts and pictures. I especially want to entice the willing to blog their papers/abstracts, and so increase the possible range of their feedback. Fingers crossed!

"To Say Something In the Wondering" (Part One)

2009-12-08T18:27:00.013-06:00

[Take note that Daniel Barber and Adam Kotsko continue, with the fourth and fifth posts, respectively, the discussion of Goodchild’s Theology of Money.]

"...I understand theoretical work not as establishing universal truths but as developing conceptual schemes that can be taken up and revised in various locations and times."

Judith Butler

My last post referenced the newly available podcast of Judith Butler’s talk on Judaism, Zionism, and the religious resources for the critique of state violence. I strongly encourage taking the time to listen her talk (along with the others by Habermas, Taylor, and West). I’ll have more to say about the content of her remarks in part two of this post, but to those for whom it might be useful, I’ve prepared a partial transcription of the text from the podcast. It was never my aim to transcribe her talk, either in full or part; rather, as I listened to it with the intention of taking a few notes, I found myself doing much more than that. I once again found myself compelled and arrested by Butler’s voice, by her words. This relates to my own—and what some have called perverse—love of Butler’s prose style. There’s magic happening for me in Butler’s syntax and word choice, grammar and lexicon. Maybe it’s her performance of a certain dialectical defamiliarization, most often present through a repeated employment of unresolved interrogative serialities. What Butler theorizes at the level of social ontology and subjectivity, she exemplifies at the level of prose style: instability, incompleteness, and a certain constitutive incoherence. The prose performs what it describes.

For such reasons—and I’m sure there are many other ones, only some of which I may be aware and able to articulate—I always return to and eagerly anticipate and devour any of her writings. A similar affective relation subtends my continual engagement with a range of other thinkers—Sedgwick, Caputo, Derrida, Agamben, de Certeau, Lingis, Benjamin, Hardt/Negri, Barthes, Deleuze, Foucault, Levinas, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Nancy, Hegel, and Jordan, to name only those to whom I most often return. For me, what such a list of thinkers share that is most compelling, most arresting, is not just the radicality of their provocative content, but their equally radical presentative forms—forms ranging from and operative at the levels of syntax and lexicon through choices to challenge disciplinary codes of argumentative intelligibility by employing aphorism, the anti-philosophically ethnographic essay, or more general disruptions to the mise-en-page. Just as Butler can speak in Undoing Gender of experiences of dispossession in the making of a livable life, so too can we speak of the need for forms of cognitive dispossessions. This, for me, has always been the most compelling and visceral importance of theory: it’s ability to undo us and to compel new forms of thinking and relating. Theory is, and has always been, for me eminently visceral.

But my appeal to listen to Butler’s podcast emerges out of another conviction, one that aims to counter certain accepted stereotypes of theorists as amounting to little more than caricatures of thought or reductionistic tag lines: what we might call the “greeting card theory of theory.” Implicit here is the belief that theorists can’t continue to develop their thinking. This was also the case with Derrida’s reception within literature programs, as if “figuring out” the Derrida of the 1970s was “figuring out” anything interesting he might ever have to say. A similar example might be the largely new historicist promulgation of the Foucault of Discipline and Punish and History of Sexuality, Volume I.

I think this has been played out perniciously in Butler’s case, and perhaps with no greater vehemence than Martha Nussbaum’s painfully vicious 1999 New Republic ad hominem. Indeed, many will recall that Nussbaum’s text is but an example of its author’s own inflated sense of importance as a diagnostician of what is “properly” theoretical and therefore good (with all its moral weight) work; Nussbaum’s supposed “engagement” with Butler is so cartoonish that even those critics who have disagreed with or contested Butler’s positions often find themselves coming to her defense against Nussbaum. But while I may have conjured this ghost of the critical past (and there’s an obvious psychoanalytic discussion to be had as to why I feel so haunted by this ghost, why I can seem to let it stay dead and buried where it belongs), I certainly don’t want it to linger. Or, perhaps more fitting for these long December days, we might think of my conjuration of Nussbaum’s horrid text less as some reanimated spirit than a bit of undigested beef. Humbug!

In any event, the reception of theory is something about which I am very often concerned, and in this I am as interested in who has been received and when as the what of theirs that has been privileged. Certainly one can point to the all-important issue of translation, and it is always crucial to consider when and what possible motivations (including the culturally symptomatic) obtain within a field of translatability. Why translate this work at this time? So,there is a discussion to be had about the temporality of theory. But we can also consider the issue more restrictively. What aspects of a thinker’s output are considered readable within a certain disciplinary horizon? Posing this question certainly doesn’t (or at least need not) entail effacing a consideration of theory’s temporality: our desires for particular theoretical schemes are as much a response to certain felt needs as they are the conditions by which we are enabled to recognize what our needs might be.

It is in this way that I agree with Jonathan Culler, who writes about how we are “ineluctably in theory”: that our very ability to pose the questions we ask is itself already made possible by the “space articulated by theory” (see his The Literary in Theory, pp. 2-3). This is why theory can never be a simple reflection of some believed independent reality leading to some supposedly practical application. No, theory never shuttles in such a way, as if the distance between points A and B were so easily bridged. There is more like a New York subway line: initial tracks may have been previously laid, but new ones will always be needed, new tunnels and lines constructed, and in each and every instance, amidst a diverse throng of passengers boarding and departing in their many anonymous and exponentially infinite ways, there are starts, stops, detours, and the occasional pull of the emergency break.

This unexpected peroration aside, Butler’s podcast also speaks directly to the reception and appreciation of her most recent work, especially insofar as these writings deal with questions of ethics and religion. Here another point to raise but hold in abeyance is what precisely is meant when one speaks of the/a "re/turn to ethics" or, somewhat correlatively, the "re/turn religion." Derrida, of course, famously resisted this language of turns, and equally so, I think, I think in Butler. Not only does all this talk of "turning" leave us dizzy, it fails to account for its own performativity: to interpellate a “turn” toward ethics/religion is to call into being a horizon of audibility within which certain claims might be speakable. That is, whatever else a "turn" in theoretical circles might be, it is far from a constative naming but instead a tropological performance. To speak of a theoretical "turn" can also be a way of retroactively fitting previously unheard (sometimes willfully misread or ignored) texts or positions into a now consumable product (and I think such capitalist language of the marketable is appropriately descriptive). Here we do well to recall that the very rhetorical language of "tropping" we might use to describe this phenomenon itself stems from the Greek tropos for "turning," since in a trope one turns a thing’s literal meaning toward more figurative ends. So maybe getting dizzy is constitutive of the theoretical game: "pussycat, pussycat, we all fall down." So much for abeyance.

In part two, I will return (or, perhaps, finally attend to) Butler’s comments on religion and Judaism within the context of some of her other recent writings and the appeals therein to those proper names—Benjamin, Levinas, and Arendt, most notably—of a certain Jewish intellectual tradition.

Friday Florilegium: Money, Secularism, Religion, Anonymity

2009-12-04T10:42:00.014-06:00

So, in my ever-renewed efforts to update this blog more frequently, here are few new interesting links I've come across.

Day 3 of the ongoing discussion of Goodchild's Theology of Money

The Immanent Frame, a collective blog offering a forum for interdisciplinary exchanges among leading humanities and social sciences scholars around the issues of secularism, religion, and the public sphere, previously posted the audio files from its October symposium at SUNY Stony Brook on "Rethinking Secularism." The event featured talks by notables Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, Judith Butler, and Cornell West, with closing remarks by Craig Calhoun. See here for an open thread on the event. As a supplement to these aforementioned links, which were all posted in early November, now see here for the full text of the ensuing exchange between Butler and West as moderated by Eduardo Mendieta.

Kvond offers an especially elegant rejoinder to the most recent in a series of attacks on anonymous blogging. I won't enter the fray of such "prejudicial hilarity" here, except to note that what I find so elegant about this rejoinder is Kvond's Spinozistico-Deleuzian meditation on the benefits and possibilities of "anto-nymy" as continuing the "long history of pseudonymous writings" within the "virtual world’s new potentiality for micro-climates of interpersonal subjectivity." Offered there is a truly graceful reminder about the powers and effectivities of blogging as an activity of pure immanence as contained/enacted in the "name." Kvond's rejoinder here to the equally always thought-provoking Larval Subjects continues earlier conversations, on which see here and here.

Also, I'll be posting more original content over the next few days, including (with permission) an interesting email exchange I've had with a friend and colleague regarding President Obama's speech this week and his "decision" to surge the troop levels in Afghanistan. Two other forthcoming posts will concern the observance of earlier this week of "World AIDS Day," and another on my now less than recent thoughts about the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Montreal at the beginning of November, including the very positive reception of my paper on Jean Gerson, the discernment of spirits, and masturbation. But more on that shortly.

Taking Note: Reading Goodchild, Heading CFPs

2009-12-03T07:47:00.011-06:00

Please continue to take note of the extremely interesting and productive book discussion of Philip Goodchild's Theology of Money. For the basics, see my earlier post here.

Tom Striphas over at Differences & Repetitions has helpfully posted two recent CFPs that have been making there around the interwebs.

"Beneath the University, the Commons," to be held at the University of Minnesota, April 8-11, 2010. The deadline for abstracts and/or other forms of participation is January 1, 2010. This event continues the important work of two previous gatherings on "Re-Thinking" and "Re-Working" the university, on which see www.reworkingtheu.org. To echo Striphas, this looks amazing! Please check it out. Perhaps there might be some collective interest for participation among BABEL members?

"Gilbert Simondon: Transduction, Translation, Transformation," to be held at the American University of Paris, May 27-28, 2010 (Paris, France). The deadline for abstracts is January 30, 2010.

Theology of Money: A Book Discussion/Event

2009-12-01T06:46:00.010-06:00

Beginning today and continuing for the next twelve days, the theological/philosophical bloggers over at An und für sich will be offering the latest in their series of in-depth book discussions. The volume under review is Philip Goodchild's very exciting and recent offering, Theology of Money. For those unfamiliar with the Goodchild's work in philosophical theology, the following interview might prove helpful. The book was originally published by SCM Press in the U.K., and so there is also a new preface accompanying the U.S. edition, released by Duke Press as part of their new and exciting "New Slant: Religion, Politics, and Ontology" series. Those, like myself, who are especially interested in Deleuzian treatments of contemporary culture, will be particularly interested in this book discussion, since Goodchild has made repeated and constructive use of Deleuze's thought.

Now on Academia & Scribd

2009-10-14T08:23:00.003-05:00

So, this is my first post in months. I've just finally joined up with Academia.edu and found out about and joined Scribd.com. Hoping to add more content to both sites, plus begin a more regular blogging schedule. I also remain active on Facebook, but utterly resisting Twitter.

On Defeat, Disappointment, & Divergence: A "Prop 8" Florilegium

2009-06-04T17:00:00.017-05:00

Despite a range of other political events in the past week -- including New Hampshire's move to legalize same-sex marriage -- I'm still thinking about the California Supreme Court's ruling that upheld the constitutionality of the November voter-passage of Proposition 8 banning same-sex marriages. In a bittersweet move, the 18,000 couples married between May and November 2009, when same-sex marriage was legal in the state, are still considered valid.

The lone dissenter to the majority opinion, Justice Moreno, lambasted the majority -- and California voters -- for the passage of a an "unprecedented instance of...altering the meaning of the equal protection clause...to require deprivation of a fundamental right on the basis of a suspect classification." For the nearly 200-page document of the California Supreme Court, including its majority and two concurring opinions and Justice Moreno's biting dissent, see here (dated 5/26/09; docket # S168047) or here, if you'd rather not download the pdf. For some helpful, if at times partisan, legal analysis, see here, here, here, and here.

I offer the below florilegium as a way to register not only the affects of defeat and disappointment in the wake of the California ruling but also to suggest some divergence from the rights-based, divisive identity politics strategy of seeking legal recognition for same-sex marriage. I find myself in the queerly contradictory position of being both against banning same-sex marriage and against legalizing same-sex marriage, insofar as these alternatives -- banning, legalizing -- are framed within co-implicated systems of domination.

“People today seem unable to understand love as a political concept….The modern concept of love is almost exclusively limited to the bourgeois couple and the claustrophobic confines of the nuclear family. Love has become a strictly private affair. We need a more generous and more unrestrained conception of love. We need to recuperate the public and political conception of love common to premodern traditions….love as a political act that constructs the multitude. Love means precisely that our expansive encounters and continuous collaborations bring us joy….We need to rediscover today this material and political sense of love, a love as strong as death. This does not mean you cannot love your spouse, your mother, and your child. It only means that your love does not end there, that love serves as the basis for our political projects in common and the construction of a new society. Without this love, we are nothing.”

“Queer politics is…a performative collective project of rebellion and creation. It is not really an affirmation of homosexual identities but a subversion of the logics of identity in general. There are no queer bodies, only queer flesh that resides in the communication and collaboration of social conduct.”

“Subversion is always partial and localized….If subversion does not subvert something specific at a specific moment, it does nothing at all. Thus one always needs to ask what the aim of subversion is, and what it is destabilizing….We should add that if ‘subversion’ is always partial, this is partly because a subject’s position within relations of domination is never simple. There are always multiple hierarchizations, sometimes contradictory among themselves….We need to try to conceive of the ensemble of systems of domination and oppression together as a totality, to think of these systems in their multiplicity and with all of their articulations.”

“Revolt is never only a matter of action. Revolt, the forces of opposition, grow out of resistance, reflection. The combination of these new powers becomes very important: it determines the content of struggles….The victory of the authorities…[does] not reaffirm the old system but, on the contrary, profoundly modifie[s] it, making possible new forms of resistance and struggles, new lines of flight. It [is] therefore necessary to adapt to this new situation, to respond to trends, to the reality of the new relations of power that this transformation implie[s].”

“[Why is there] always the demand to be oriented toward sustained, intimate relationships…?”

“The topic of gay marriage is not the same as that of gay kinship….The petition for marriage rights seeks to solicit state recognition for nonheterosexual unions, and so configures the state as withholding an entitlement that it really should distribute in a nondiscriminatory way, regardless of sexual orientation….The normalizing powers of the state are made especially clear, however, when we consider how continuing quandaries about kinship both condition and limit the marriage debates….[L]et us consider for the moment the ambivalent gift that legitimation can become. To be legitimated by the state is to enter into the terms of legitimation offered there, and to find that one’s public and recognizable sense of personhood is fundamentally dependent on the lexicon of that legitimation. It follows that the delimitation of legitimation will take place only through an exclusion of a certain sort, though not a patently dialectical one. The sphere of legitimate intimate alliance is established through the producing and intensifying regions of illegitimacy….[But] we misunderstand the sexual field if we consider that the legitimate and the illegitimate appear to exhaust its immanent possibilities. There is outside the struggle between the legitimate and illegitimate… field that is less thinkable, one not figured in light of its ultimate convertability into legitimacy….”

“It is undeniable that the restriction of marriage to heterosexual couples is a potent form of discrimination, regulation, and stigma. But to combat that inequality requires us to think beyond the mere inclusion of gay couples and to recognize that marrying has consequences for the unmarried.”

“…within the history of gay culture, even in the case of an individual author, a tradition of conformism and a tradition of subversion can coexist to the point of being indissociable, even indistinguishable, from one another. The two are one. It is perhaps even the very inextricability of the two traditions that defines what we call gay culture.”

“…those who live outside the conjugal frame or maintain modes of social organization for sexuality that are neither monogamous nor quasi-marital are more and more considered unreal, and their loves and losses less than ‘true’ loves and ‘true’ losses. The derealization of this domain of human intimacy and sociality works by denying reality and truth to the relations in at issue….To intervene [in this object field] in the name of transformation means precisely to disrupt what has become settled knowledge and knowable reality, and to use, as it were, one’s unreality to make an otherwise impossible or illegible claim….[W]hen the unreal lays claim to reality, or enters into its domain, something other than a simple assimilation into prevailing norms can and does take place. The norms themselves can become rattled, display their instability, and become open to resignification.”

“A state that promotes marriages also disenfranchises people whose primary affinities do not get into the couple form and contributes to a culture that stereotypes these people as isolated failures, as immature and/or sexually indiscriminating, or as part of some mysteriously primitive social system.”

“The ability to imagine and cultivate forms of the good life that do not conform to the dominant pattern would seem to be at least as fundamental as any putative ‘right to marry.’ If so, then the role of the state should be to protect against the abuses of majoritarianism.”

“What would it be like if intimate couplehood did not have to function as an economic safety net for so many people?”

“Liberation unfolds a process that breaks with the oppressing way of life in order to actualize the shape of a fairer and more humane life. In short, liberation is a struggle for self-determination of one’s own existence by suffering….Liberation carries with it an immanent form of creation through labor such that to create and to produce is simultaneously to save. Work = liberation. Salvation is found in the act of laboring, which transcends the self-enclosure of alienation and estrangement.”

“Should a homosexual be a good citizen?”

“We need to begin to imagine an alternative legal strategy and framework: a conception of privacy that expresses the singularity of social subjectivities (not private property) and a conception of the public based on the common (not state control)….This is a molecular conception of the law.”

“A conception of activism as enlarging the life options of gay men and lesbians has a manifest appeal….But this way of thinking says nothing about whether pursuing legal marriage is a good political strategy, about the ethical question of what marrying does, about state regulation, or about the normativity of marriage….Presenting marriage as an unconstrained individual option—a ‘license’ in the same sense as a ‘sexual license’—requires us to forget that it is a social system of both permission and restriction….A marriage license is the opposite of sexual license. Sexual license is everything the state does not license, and therefore everything the state allows itself to punish and regulate. The gay and lesbian movement was built on a challenge to this regulatory system”

“Great political events are not the only things that are hard to live through. There are also all the simpler things, where one often has the impression of being in the right—it always takes time to realize how much others have suffered.”

“Possibility is not a luxury; it is as crucial as bread.”

“…memory determines continuity. And continuity is always the expression of power. It [is] necessary to sustain a subjective point of view, to combat the ‘blurring’ of history by which the authorities [seek] to mask our role and create an appearance of continuity. It is this blurring of reality that push[es] us off course, and that continues still today to hold us back.”

“So send them forth, though sorrowing, yet in peace;
…………………………new hope to spring
Out of despair, joy but with fear yet linked…”

= = = = =

Sources [in order of citation]

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude, pp. 351-52
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude, p. 200.
Didier Eribon, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, pp. 126-27.
Antonio Negri, Negri on Negri, pp. 41-42.
Michael Cobb, “Lonely, SAQ 106.3 (2007): p. 446.
Judith Butler, Undoing Gender, pp. 102-06.
Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life, p. 108
Didier Eribon, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, p. 126.
Judith Butler, Undoing Gender, pp. 26-28.
Elizabeth Freeman, The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture, p. 2.
Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life, p. 112.
Elizabeth Freeman, The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture,
Gabriele Fadini, “Ontological Resistance: A Meditation on Exodus and Power,” trans., Creston Davis, Angelaki 12.1 (April 2007), p. 66, emphasis original.
Leo Bersani, Homos, p. 113.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude, pp. 203-4.
Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life, pp. 95-97.
Antonio Negri, Negri on Negri, p. 43.
Judith Butler, Undoing Gender, p. 29.
Antonio Negri, Negri on Negri, p. 41.
John Milton, Paradise Lost 11.117 and 11.138-39.

Pardon the Shamless Plug...

2009-06-02T10:08:00.005-05:00

...but my review of Marilynn Desmond's Ovid's Art and the Wife of Bath: The Ethics of Erotic Violence has officially appeared in print. My copy of GLQ arrived in the mail the other day. While I posted an earlier version of the review here, some subsequent changes were made. I'm very grateful to Beth Freeman, GLQ's "Books in Brief" editor, for her care, critical attention, and generosity that together made my review venture with GLQ a highly rewarding one. I only hope that there might be other opportunities int he future.

I've posted the pdf of my review to the right; readers will need to scroll down to page 10 for the beginning my review, since GLQ places all the "Books in Brief" reviewed into one pdf.

In Memoriam: Eve Kosofsky Sedwick (1950-2009)

2009-04-13T14:12:00.012-05:00

updated

It is with profound sadness that I write to say that the influential literary critic and queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedwick has died after al long battle with cancer. She had been earlier diagnosed with cancer in 1991, and put her struggles into the poetic prose of A Dialogue on Love. This relentless disease has taken one of our most gifted and passionate critics far too soon.

As I mourn the loss of so singular an intellectual, I find myself pondering a curious experience I had only minutes before returning to my hotel in New York City. I had visited The Strand bookstore, where among the many millions of items, I came across a copy of Jonathon Goldberg's Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities. Although I ultimately decided not to purchase the volume, I remember Goldberg's dedication reading simply, "For Eve Sedgwick..."

There have been two blog posts so far commenting on her passing here, here, here, here and here. The GLBT magazine The Advocate ran this, and The Nation has run an elegant and substantial piece. The New Yorker ran this obit. I will try to add further links when they become available.

Glossing Toward New York

2009-04-07T23:18:00.008-05:00

Well, I'm packing and otherwise preparing to leave for NYC to present at the "Glossing Is Glorious" Conference, organized by Nicola Masciandaro and held at the CUNY Graduate School. I present on Thursday afternoon. I already posted the information for my paper. After much re-working, I finally opted for an organizational structure recursively formed around three theses. In doing this, I'm taking formal inspiration from Paul Strohm's wonderful "What Can We Know about Chaucer that He Didn’t Know about Himself?," a chapter in his Theory and the Predmodern Text (pp. 165-81). I say "resursively," because I intentionally return to a series of issues in my treatment of Gower's manuscript and printed text. I plan on posting an excerpt (or perhaps the entire thing) after the conference, but for now here are the three theses I'm using as organizational rubrics:

Ontology is always already prior to semiosis.
Morphologies of possession exist within technological fields of thought.
A book's presentative schemes enact a biopolitics of affect and attachment.

AAR, Montreal -- Paper Accepted

2009-04-03T00:58:00.006-05:00

Although I still have work to do in preparation for next week's glossing conference at CUNY, I did receive the good news a few days ago that my paper proposal for the next meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Montreal next fall was accepted. I submitted to a consultation that was new last year, "Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in Premodern Christianity." This year they were particularly interested in projects that explored its key terms at the nexus of scriptural interpretation. For those not familiar with the AAR process, individuals must submit a 1000-word proposal along with a 150-word abstract. I've included below only the abstract, and will provide more details about my paper later. I have to have it completed by mid-September, since the consultation chairs have secured Harvard's Amy Hollywood as our respondent.

The Solitary Vices of Medieval Discernment

The biblical injunction to “test the Spirits” (1 John 4:1) gave hermeneutical warrant for church officials to codify affects of vigilance and skepticism into forms of institutional mistrust called the “discernment of spirits.” This paper offers a reconsideration of medieval discernment literature by arguing that it is isomorphic with those moral rhetorics surrounding masturbation. Operative in both discursive registers is a fear of unregulated solitude. Examining scholarship on discernment literature alongside the cultural history and analysis of masturbation, I re-read selected passages from the writings of Jean Gerson and Middle English Chastising of God’s Children. The regulatory aims of these texts index the erotic power of thought to captivate and redirect a believer’s (sometimes unwilling) consciousness. Compelling both the solitary visions of the aspiring mystic and the “solitary vice” of masturbation are forms and languages of erotic pleasure that official theology fears are actually forms of selfishness.

Oh the Trials and tribulations...

2009-03-28T01:18:00.008-05:00

Dear Readers,

To say that these last several months have been hectic and upending would be an understatement. But I'm here to assure you that my disappearance is over, although I will be without my macbook for a bit since I've had to send it off for repairs. I have planned a number of posts on a range of topics, including a few series: one about the current state of humanities (especially graduate) education, and another on the "home." Also, I'm planning at least two politically oriented posts, one of which will feature a return to my own juvenilia by re-engaging Melville's "Bartleby." And look for a post around Easter. In addition, I have been lucky enough to secure a few guest bloggers.

In the meantime, I've uploaded a full listing of UT-Austin affiliated folks who are participating in the Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo. Although I'm not on tap this year, I'm planning to attend. Speaking of conferences, I'm very excited about the upcoming "Glossing Is a Glosrious Thing: The Past, Present, and Future of Commentary," which will be April 9-10 at CUNY. I'm delivering my paper on the 9th at 1:30pm. I've included the original abstract below. As I said to Nicola back at the SEMA gathering, I'm still not thrilled about my own title (yet). I'm very much looking forward to spending a few days in NYC with some great folks, and then I'll be extending my leave a bit by visiting friends in New Haven and Boston. Can't wait to see everyone!

After Print: On the Biopolitical Marginalia of Affect and Attachment

This paper argues that prior to any semiotics of the page necessitating decipherment, there is always already an ontology of the page determining, via sets of anterior structural acts, the grids of intelligibility through which meaning might emerge. Supplementing Giorgio Agamben’s work with the recent efforts of Judith Butler and Lauren Berlant on attachment and affect, this paper aims to develop an optics wherein the book’s material status is shown to make possible more than its constituent materiality. Not only does the manner of our concernful relations to objects determine what those objects are but also the very legibility of these attachments is itself a structurated mode of being.

In Arts of Possession, D. Vance Smith posits that “writing histories of the forms of living requires us at least to understand practices of having” (xiii). But the morphology of these possessive practices obtains within a technological field of thought, wherein technology is never simply about the uses to which specialized tools and machines are put but refers to an entire comportment toward the world that alters our relations to that world’s constituent beings. To technologize is to install an optics of criterial control.

Glossing offers itself as particularly useful in thinking about the ontological structuring of presentative appearances. This paper considers what happens to the commentatorial apparatus of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis as it transitions from manuscript to printed page. What appears in manuscript as a single column Middle English text surrounded by rubricated Latin verse and marginalia becomes in Caxton’s printing a two-columned, typographically unified space that shifts the marginalia into the main text. Accounting for this presentative shift requires not a pre- to post-technological causality but an ontologically contingent relation disclosing how entities are made or possibilized as present. A book does something because something has been done to a book. Here glossing practices become a formed relation informing epochal shifts in the conditions for scenes of reading.

As I continuing writing the paper, I find myself leaning more on more not only on Agamben but especially on Heidegger.

Holy Aporias, Batman!

2008-12-17T23:23:00.004-06:00

In Eadmer's Life of St. Anselm--a 13th century text that illustrates a developing interest in and market for writings about a living saint--a fellow abbot describes to Anselm his difficulties with the child monks in his charge: "They are incorrigible ruffians. We never give over beating them day and night, and they only get worse and worse. " To this abbot's frustration, Anselm responds by indicating that it is not the methods but the educational philosophy that are at fault:

Are they not human? Are they not flesh and blood like you?....Consider this. You wish to form them in good habits by blows and chastisement alone. Have you ever seen a goldsmith form his leaves of gold and silver into a beautiful figure with blows alone? I think not....In order to mould this leaf into a suitable form he now presses it and strikes it gently with hist tool, and now ever more gently raises it with careful pressure and gives it shape. So if you want your boys to be adorned with good habits, you too, besides the pressure of blows, must apply the encouragement and help of fatherly sympathy and gentleness (Southern, pp. 37-38).

What the goldsmith does, in this telling, is to creat an impression, an image. Elsewhere, Eadmer tells us that Anselm "compared the time of youth to a piece of wax of the right consistency for the impress of a seal....If it preserves a mean between extremes...extremes of hardness and softness, when it is stamped with the seal [matrix], it will receive the image clear and whole" (Southern, p. 20).

There are certainly a range of possible issues on which to interpretatively seize: pedagogical practices (cf., Guibert of Nogent), the new genre of living saint hagiographies and its connections to the growing exegencies and codifying of a canonization process, or Anselm's sexual metaphorics crying out for comparative analysis with later writers (here I'm think especially and most obviouly of Alan of Lille). But what most interests me is precisely this metaphorics of impression-making and its hagiographical placement. It is a metaphorics on which later spiritual writers will capitalize (see, e.g., Igantius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises), and which nicely registers what I would call the "aporetics of sanctity."

When, in other words, does a model become a template? When does the initial force exerted to create the impression--and, in my Deleuzian-inspired thinking, nothing is possible without the exertion of force, which is a neither in itself a good or bad thing--become something imposed with constrictively carceral power? I recognize that "template" may also effect certain processes of change, since when one follows an eletronic document template one is still able to make alterations. Still, what seems important is how a template establishes the boundaries and constituent parts of a field. Whereas a model is something to be emulated, a template is something to be followed. Moreover, and here I'm thinking of a more commonly scientifistic usage, a model can be modeled. That is, "model" can function as both noun and verb. The practice of modeling seems to be a practice a fabulation.

The aporetics of sanctiy, then, is that zone of indistinction or indiscernability where a model offered for emulation morphs into a template imposed. It is such an aporetics, and the moments of both indiscernability and radical undecidability it opens, that determine the patternability and force of sanctity.

[All quotations from Eadmer's Life of St. Anselm are taken from R. W. Southern's 1962 translation]

"Rekindling Memories": On Martyrs

2008-12-16T01:00:00.014-06:00

Well, readers, it's been more than a month since I last posted anything new on this blog! Chronic sickness along with several other important obligations and issues have kept me particularly busy the last little while. I hope to use the much-desired winter break to do more posting. For now, however, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to use Jeff Cohen's recent "Flash Review" post on Daniel Boyarin's Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (1999) as a chance to revisit Boyarin's excellent study. Below is an excerpt from a paper I wrote for a class on late ancient traditions of martydom and apocalypitc literature while I was attending Yale Divinity School. I cleaned it up only a smidge, since it was written back in the spring of 2003, and I now cringe when a reread it. In the below except, I explicate another work as well, The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era (1995) by Judith Perkins.

For anyone interested in the subject, I'd also recommend the following more recent titles:

Elizabeth Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (2004)
Virgina Burrus, The Sex Lives of Saints: An Erotics of Ancient Hagiography (2007)
Virginia Burrus, Saving Shame: Martyrs, Saints, and Other Abject Subjects (2008)
L. Stephanie Cobb, Dying to Be Men: Gender and Language in Early Christian Martyr Texts (2008)

Lastly, Boyarin takes up the theme of an alleged Jewish and Christian "parting of the ways" in a substantial way in his Boder Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (2006).

By the way, my title makes reference to Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History. Speaking of the martyrs’ fortitude, he writes: “Sometimes they were killed with the axe,…sometimes their legs were broken….Sometimes they were hung up by the feet head down over a slow fire…; sometimes noses, ears, and hands were severed.” But such fortitude was only part of the story for him and his fellow Christians—these heroic acts also had to be remembered. Eusebius skillfully wrote to “rekindle the memory of the martyrs" (trans., G. A. Williamson [1984], pp. 341-42).

+ + + + + + +

[NOTE: This version does not contain my copiously fetishized habit of footnoting. I have a pdf version featuring those notes. Can someone tell me how I can upload a pdf file?]

Here's the pdf version of the below text.

Creeds and confessions notwithstanding, Christian speech is dependent upon the recurrence of certain ideal figures, one of which is the “martyr,” who became for subsequent generations of Christians a script or topos, a pattern for generating new speech on a particular theme or given case. The martyr is indicative of the power of Christian rhetoric to create, develop, and impose moral identities, serving as one answer to the constant problem of self-definition. Martyrs, and their corresponding hagiographies, became especially important sources for Christians of the fourth and fifth centuries uneasy about the “drift into a respectable Christianity.” As Averil Cameron has shown, such Christians made creative use of history through the composition of vitae, a flexible genre that allowed greater opportunity for integrating public and private in new ways. “Through Lives, Christian writers could present an image not only of the perfect Christian life but also of the life in imitation of Christ, the life that becomes an icon….The Life itself becomes an image; Christian lives of the present are interpreted in terms of their relation to sacred lives of the past.” Thus, such vitae served ideological functions as literary exemplars—texts to be read more as “verbal portraits” than historical reconstructions.

What strikes me most forcibly in the study of the martyrs is the way in which martyrdom is constantly associated with the community life of Christians. The work of Peter Brown has shown how martyrs became potent “invisible companions” who served many of the same functions as powerful patrons of the ancient world; they were conduits of both social and spiritual power. Shrines dedicated to martyrs, for example, often acted as defensive works, walls, or towers. That martyrdom is connected to community life might seem apparent to some, but in the study of cultural assumptions it is just such obvious points that require attention: “People only become martyrs because others make them so.” Attending to such concerns, I submit, means a shift in our historical orientations away from “the world behind the text,” and towards reflection on how communities continually ascribe meaning to particular events, acts, texts, and practices. So, in contrast to much historical thinking, which is empirical or positivistic in nature and focuses attention on questions of genesis, I see historical study, like cultural analysis, not as “an experimental science in search of a law, but an interpretive one in search of meaning.”

.......

There is a near consensus view among historians that traces the meaning of “martyr” to an early Greek term for “witness.” It then proceeds to connect this witnessing language with traditions of “noble death,” ultimately producing a picture of martyrdom that many today easily recognize. In common religious parlance, the term “martyr” is used to name one who undergoes hardships to the point of suffering—but not intending—death for one’s religious convictions, and this stands in contradistinction to a “confessor,” or one who is of equal religious resolve but is not subjected to death. One plausible explanation for this sharp distinction in meaning is that martus enters Latin literature as a Greek loan word. A loan word initiates a process of displacement whereby the borrowed word enters its new linguistic community as a technical term. Thus, the original Greek meaning of “witness” began to slip away until, by c.150 C.E., it came to imply the specific aforementioned meaning. In fact, no less a magisterial figure than the eighteenth-century Edward Gibbon paused to exclaim: “A martyr! How strangely that word has been distorted from its original sense of a common witness.”

This view overlooks several important factors that, taken into consideration, may significantly enrich our understanding of how martyrial language was used by Christians—or that may at least complicate the picture. The most important of these factors has to do with the genetic fallacy of historical explanation, a form of which I have just illustrated. What this fails to take into account is how the language actually worked for the people who used it. To explain language, to analyze how metaphors function within a society or religious community, we must look to the wider context of that group. Some recent scholars are (re)writing martyrdom as historians become both more aware of their roles as “readers” of “texts” and appreciate how literary production makes culture. Scholars of late antiquity are currently carrying out the most critically informed historiography on the subject, and thus warrant serious attention.

“Late Ancient Studies” is a field of relatively recent invention, and is the direct result of significant changes in methods of analysis relating to the texts, characters, and life-world of ancient Christianity. These changes can be traced to the impact of “the cultural turn,” or that combination of approaches taken from cultural anthropology and literary theory. Dale Martin has recently detailed the impact of these changes: “When the ‘culture’ of the early church in its ‘cultural’ environment becomes the focus of attention, the object of study shifts to concentrate less on the intentions and conscious thinking of the ancient author. The goal of the historian becomes not the conscious or even unconscious intentions of the author, but the larger matrix of symbol systems provided by the author’s society from which he must have drawn whatever resources he used to ‘speak his mind.’” In what follows, I shall review two recent efforts that draw on and help contribute to this scholarly ferment.

The first account is the extremely provocative study by classicist Judith Perkins, The Suffering Self. Hers is a study concerned with representations qua representations. As Perkins recounts it, she came to the recognition that “what I had been accepting as simply realistic presentation in texts was, in fact, part of an extensive formulation in the culture of the second century that represented the human self as a body in pain, a sufferer.” To her eye, Christianity’s projecting of this particular portrait of the human self came into conflict with another, more prevailing and traditional Greco-Roman image of the self as a soul/mind in control of the body and its passions. Drawing on a wide range of ancient sources, both pagan and Christian, and informed by the theories of Foucault, Geertz, and others, Perkins aims to bring into cultural consciousness a discourse that Christianity so co-opted that it no longer appears strange to claim that the Christian is a suffering self. Her intention is “to try to locate the triumph of Christianity within the discursive struggle over these representations. It would be around one of these represented ‘subjects,’ the suffering self, that Christianity as a social and political unity would form and ultimately achieve its institutional power.” Further, the subjectivity that was under construction was not produced by Christianity alone, but also issued from other locations in late antiquity—e.g., medical treaties and the lives of holy people and philosophers. The social power of this ideological work can be seen in how the Christian community of late antiquity came to include, at least conceptually, the mute, poor, and paralytic. In short, these reordered beliefs about pain and death, “representing pain as empowering and death a victory, helped to construct a new understanding of human existence, a new ‘mental set’ toward the world that would have far-reaching consequences….To project a material body just like this material body is to suggest a social body just like this social body, only with a different hierarchy based on new rules of empowerment.” By placing on display the lacerated, torn, burnt cadaver of the martyr, early Christian communities enacted a powerful discourse of subversion, thus altering their abject status within the Roman hierarchy.

The Suffering Self quickly emerges as an important work for contemporary approaches to early Christian martyrdom. The important implication to draw is that early Christian self-representation as a community of sufferers did not so much describe “actual” situations as provide for the growth and construction of a new cultural subject, one that tended to subvert prevailing assumptions about selfhood and provided social capital for Christianity’s growth in power. “Narratives script reality for readers and Christian texts were inscribing one particular narrative pattern over and over for their readers and listeners. Christian narratives consistently offered a new literary happy ending for readers—death; in particular, the martyr’s death.” So, rather than marriage serving to give the sense of an ending, Christians denied this traditional social nexus and embraced a threatrics of death: “the martyrs were cultural performers acting out dramatically the community’s beliefs that to be a Christian was to suffer and die.” Central to Perkins’s way of thinking is an attention to representation as an ideological construct having historical effect: martyr texts help to socially construct early Christian memories and thought-worlds, thus also contributing to a politics of representation.

A second recent work on martyrdom comes from the pen of noted Talmudist Daniel Boyarin. Drawing on current models of identity formation, trends in cultural criticism, and with a focus on hybridity, Boyarin deconstructs the stable binaries of “Judaism” and “Christianity.” He argues that in this period there was no clear delineation between Jews and Christians as practitioners of separate religions; rather, this eventual “parting of the ways” was the product of the “long fourth century,” a project intimately associated with martyrdom. As he importantly observes:

Martyrdom, even more than tragedy, is Thanatoi en tōi phanarōi, “deaths that are seen,” murders in public spaces. Insofar as martyrdom is, then, by definition, a practice that takes place within the public and, therefore, shared space, martyria seem to be a particularly fertile site for the exploration of the permeability of the borders between so-called Judaism and so-called Christianity in late antiquity.

Boyarin has produced a fascinating study that challenges some of the basic assumptions within late ancient studies. For our purposes, it is his fourth chapter that is most important. Rather than restrict the meaning of martyrdom to genetic questions, Boyarin prefers another route:

I propose that we think of martyrdom as a ‘discourse,’ as a practice of dying for God and of talking about it, a discourse that changes and develops over time and undergoes particularly interesting transformations among rabbinic Jews and other Jews, including Christians, between the second and the fourth centuries. For the “Romans,” it didn’t matter much whether the lions were eating a robber or a bishop, and it probably didn’t make much of a difference to the lions, but the robber’s friends and the bishop’s friends told different stories about those leonine meals. It is in these stories that martyrdom, as opposed to execution or dinner, can be found, not in "what happened".

The appearance of “discourse” in this definition is crucial, and merits attention. Here “discourse” describes something greater than mere representation; discourse is never innocent, but connotes the rhetoricity of any attempt to convey (produce) truth about humans and their society. That is, discourse names that which in a society appears timeless, transparent, commonsensical. In short, its focus “is the organized and regulated, as well as the regulating and constituting, functions of language….its aim is to describe the surface linkages between power, knowledge, institutions, intellectuals, the control of populations, and the modern state at these intersect in the functions of systems of thought.” In this regard, discourse is closely allied with notions of practice and genealogy. Further, there is a material dimension to discourse, since “discourse” makes possible disciplines and institutions, which, in turn, sustain and distribute those discourses. Thus, the making of martyrdom is a result of its interpretation as martyrdom, which is a distinct process from simply recounting a narrative of casual relations. Acts of interpretation are intimately associated with the forging of identity, and this connection between social function and interpretation is termed discursive formation. Another way of arguing these points, contends Boyarin, is to spotlight the perfomative nature of these acts as well as the eroticism present in the texts. In fact, it was this very eroticizing element that Boyarin sees as so new, for both Jews and Christians, in late ancient martyrdom—namely, an ideology of death set as the necessary fulfillment of the love of God.

Thus far, we have had occasion to consider the work of both a classicist and a Talmudist in the hope of producing a way of thinking about martyrdom. A more thorough review, of course, would need to take into account studies of the body and gender as sites of discursive practice and power relations. But, passing over these issues and across several centuries, we shift our attention to another period of Christian history where martyrs figured prominently. From the 1520s onward, there is a stunning renaissance of Christian martyrdom across Western Europe, in which some five thousand men and women—Protestants, Anabaptists, and Catholics—were judicially tried and executed. Brad Gregory has persuasively argued that, though the occasions for martyrdom dwindled in the Middle Ages, the virtues it espoused did not disappear, but were sublimated into certain devotional practices. By the late medieval period, these appeared especially in the guises of the devotio moderna and the ars moriendi, as well as the continually evolving cult of the saints. Such affective devotions were also suffused with an awareness of Christ’s suffering and death. But Jody Enders has also shown how these impulses were not always directed toward pious ends, arguing that, if one reunites the histories of medieval stagecraft and of torture, one discovers their truly rhetorical function: “The medieval understanding of torture both enabled and encouraged the dramatic representation of violence as a means of coercing theater audiences into accepting the various ‘truths’ enacted didactically in mysteries, miracles, and even farces.” Taken together, these two traditions of late medieval piety and stagecraft had sensitized the populace (“spectators”) to certain types of behavior, thus enabling them to scrutinize the condemned. The eve of the sixteenth-century, then, was ripe for a rebirth of martyrdom.

Having sampled two recent efforts at understanding Christian martyrdom, how are we to proceed? Inspired by these proposals, and in keeping with my own methodological commitments, let me offer a working definition: martyrdom is a discursive act that creates a praxial space within which to envisage a particular subjectivity—the self as sufferer—and thus also to engage in a “politics of identity.” While not intending to neglect the gruesome and horrific nature of martyrdom, which was basically a public, humiliating, and cruel death, construing martyrdom in this manner allows for a particular reading of these historical texts that sheds light on otherwise neglected features. We can begin to see connections between Christian discourse and the forging of Christian identity. Martyr accounts are hardly transparent windows, but are framed, textured and tinted by their author’s desires: we cannot, then, rely on these writers for a detailed or “accurate” account of a Christian life under persecution. So, if one of the aims of historical study is to describe what people intend by what happens, then we can say that the discourses of martyrdom “do not just reflect, in some unproblematic way, reality and social institutions, but, rather, help to create and maintain them.” Through the ideal figure of the martyr and the public spectacle that the memory of such a torn and fragmented body conjured, Christians found particularly strong ways to perform their identity as a community of sufferers.

In Memoriam: Derek Brewer (1923-2008)

2008-10-26T01:28:00.004-05:00

One of the true revolutionaries in medieval studies, Derek Brewer, has died. Not only was he a scholar of impeccable credentials with an impressively long publication record, but his influence will continue to reverberate for many years to come through the founding of his academic publishing firm, now a part of Boydell and Brewer. A bibliography of his many writings is available in Toshiyuki Takamiya's contribution to Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer, Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt, eds., (Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 263-68. With "affectionate tribute," the editors rightly speak of Prof. Brewer's "range and energy," so clearly evidenced in his many important essays, books, and editions of medieval texts. In a peroration to this "modern Chaucerian, most generous of teachers, and an unfailing friend," Morse and Windeatt write: "It is a rare modern scholar who has done so much for his subject, both through his own work and through what he has encouraged others to do" (ix). Requiescat in pace.

Friday Florilegium

2008-10-25T00:36:00.007-05:00

Despite that it is now technically Saturday, I still wanted to post the following under my titular alliterative. Sitting outside a coffee shop near my apartment on a cool Austin night, I write within view--and smell--of a courtyard populated with early twenty-somethings enjoying their late night hookah. But more than flavored aromas waft toward me, as snipits of their conversations and the sounds of nearby cars drift into/onto my fields of perception.

There have been a number of very interesting and important discussions, comments, and announcements that have bloomed around the blogosphere this week.

a still budding conversation, first initiated by Karl Steel, about St. Erkenwald
Eileen Joy's meditation on the face, which has generated much commentary
Susan Morrison's paradigm-shi(f)ting work on/in "fecopoetics and waste studies" (see here for Susan's new Palgrave book). After a very gracious headnote by Eileen, Susan's SEMA paper follows.
Jeff Cohen's wonderful announcement that the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, in collaboration with Harvard University Press, will be publishing a brand new series modeled on the Loeb Classical Library and I Tatti Renaissance Library to feature medieval Latin, Byzantine, and Old English texts (with facing-page original texts and translations). The first ten volumes will debut in 2010. A truly wonderful addition to an already fragrant garden.
Over at Mended Things, Cary's brief but profund meditation on the redemptive capacities of travel and of how sharing a planride can equilize its heterogenous passengers in their vulnerablity, from the flatulent to the first-class.
Two intriguing new book announcements: the first, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?, which features a confrontation between sometime collaborators Slavoj Zizek and British theologian John Milbank; the second a title of more explicitly theological interest, Nate Kerr's History and Apocalypitc: The Politics of Christian Mission (see here and an excerpt here)
SUNY Buffalo's upcoming (10/31-11/1) Humanities Conference on the History of Madness

In other news, tomorrow/today, Saturday, October 25th, is the annual Head of the Colorado Regatta (a.k.a., "Pumpkinhead") sponsored by the Austin Rowing Club [ARC]. Regrettably, I won't be able to compete this year, since I've been so sick since returning from SEMA that I just haven't put enough water time in to warrant boating for a 5K. In fact, I haven't rowed at all since the end of September! Still, I'll be around the race volunteering and supporting my fellow rowers and past and present teammates at ARC and Texas Crew. Who knows, I might even be needed as a sub? I'll be prepared with my spandex in case.

I've also been much engaged in contemplating the possible trajectories my blog might begin exploring. Taking on board some well-regarded advice, I'm hoping to offer at least one substantial post a month (by 5th of every month). I will continually update/post information throughout the month, which will/might include CFPs, general announcements, florilegia, and other miscellaneous items. But my hope/desire is to produce at least one (if not more) postings/essays that go into more depth about a topic or issue related either to my current research or that has been much on my mind.

To that end, I already have several posts planned out. An imminently forthcoming post will focus on marginalia, including its ontological and biopolitical dimensions. Also, in honor of the above mentioned "Pumpkinhead Regatta," I'm finally putting down (or, in this case, up) my thoughts about sport and athleticism. I intend this latter topic to be explored in a planned series of 2-3 posts. I'm also hoping, sooner rather than later, to offer a post on Erin Manning's brilliant Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty, which is a book I suggested to several BABELers and which has found its way into a few posts by Eileen Joy and Karl Steel.

Lastly tonight, I'm also mulling over the idea of a mini/quasi-blog conference on "the event," which I anticipate would feature guest bloggers that might post on the topic with reference to some of the major theorists of the event today: Deleuze, Derrida, Badiou, Zizek, Caputo. This has been especially on my mind, since next week I'll be heading to Chicago for the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion (think MLA for religion scholars). It's always an exciting and very pleasant experience for me, since I can reconnect with many friends and keep at least one body part firmly planted within the fields of religion scholarship (as if my work is ever not connected or explicitly about religious discourses/practices?). Sure to be a particularly rewarding session will be the one featuring both Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek as panelists/presenters, both of whom have been making increasingly interesting connections wtih theologians as part of the wider turn toward religion within contemporary critical theory. Zizek has spoken at AAR before (Derrida did, too), but this will be the first time Badiou has (and my first time hearing him). There's also a session devoted to Jean-Luc Nancy's recent work, Dis-Enclosure.

Look for this and more from AAR in the coming weeks and months!

BABELers, Come to TEMA 2009

2008-10-18T20:01:00.005-05:00

While it's a year away, I thought I'd let everyone know that next year UT Austin will host--for the first ever--the annual conference for TEMA. Planning is very much in the paleolithic stages, so I don't know anything about programing theme(s) or keynotes. Still, I think it would be great to organize a BABEL panel or two. The tentative (read: probable) dates for next year's conference are October 22-24, 2009. If any BABELers might be interested, feel free to let me know. Of course, as more information (e.g., a CFP) becomes available I'll post updates here and elsewhere (I'll send the CFP out to the BABEL list).

On Blogging as Practicing with a Sharp Tool

2008-10-16T23:26:00.006-05:00

Of late, there have been a few very interesting discussions about the very nature of blogging. Mary Kate Hurley discusses "Blogging as Practice."

I've also come across the following posts from a few years ago that I think speak to many of my own and others' concerns about the profitable aspects of research blogging. See here and here. See also the following:

A September 2008 link to an article about starting an academic blog
A 2007 enthusiast's and skeptic's views on academic blogging
Joseph Kugelmass's commentary on the above mentioned pieces and his earlier "Ivory Webpage" post
Rought Theory on "Blogging Terminable and Interminable"
This 2007 piece on blog writing tips
this listing of academic blogs from the Chronicle
A 2005 discussion of the possible perils and pitfalls of academic blogging
A 2004 Crooked Timber posting on the contributions academic blogging makes

Of course, while I believe one should take all possible care in both composing and publishing posts, one cannot always control what others think or do with that post. Blogs are, perhaps, the paradigmatic example of the "purloined letter."

While searching for the very meager listings of links above, I came upon a late 2007 post over at The Kugelmass Episodes, in which its author set out to discuss the "best and worst" of the academic blogosphere for 2007. Setting aside how I might feel or respond to any of the specifics in Kugelmass's blogging, I did/do find the following passage remarkably provocative and poignant, and so I close this entry with his words:

So, what’s ahead for 2008? I can’t predict trends, but I can say what I hope for, and that’s a renaissance of words in their essential loneliness. Intellectual blogging is a medium that thrives because it captures the quietude of those moments when we seal ourselves off from our surroundings in order to consider the printed words of another person. The tremulousness of the word, the expectation of an answer, the abjection and shamelessness of writing for self-publication: in order to be honest, a blogger has to be vulnerable, more so even than the author of a book. What she is writing apparently had to be blogged to be written at all. Given the voluntarism of the blogosphere, polish is merely comic; risk is the only thing worth admiring. The risk of saying too much, the risk of being unread, the risk of being misread — intellectual blogging must change from an indifferent exercise of dignified exposition into the willing practice of risk.

Announcing ... [drum roll, please]

2008-10-16T23:07:00.006-05:00

The new blog presence for the newly established graduate student collective in medieval studies at the The University of Texas at Austin, Convivencia.

I volunteered to put a blog together for the group, but it's still very rudimentary. Per the group's desires, this will be a space primarily to disseminate information about upcoming gatherings and/or events, along with other more general announcements (e.g., CFPs, conferences, student awards, etc).

Matrices of Progress: An Auto/Report

2008-10-16T20:57:00.004-05:00

Well, my previous post on SEMA seems to have generated some very nice commentary amid some controversy. I'm planning a few other posts for the coming days, including a recap of three visitors to UT-Austin last week, among other topics. I hope to be able, in addition to disseminating information, to make at least one substantial post a month. Things have been especially busy this fall, and I've been struggling since SEMA to get even minor tasks done amidst fighting a very nasty cold. One piece of good news is that this week my advisor and I established a dissertation project. So, I'm now officially writing a prospectus, and will sit for the my next series of exams (hopefully) in the late summer (or early fall). The goal is to be in candidacy by Fall 2009. Yippie!

I hope to post more about the prospectus process as I get more into the writing/researching, but I will say that the project aims to revisit the "book/body" relationship. So, more to come on that front. What most pleases me now, however, is having a clear sense of what I need to do and when. One unique facet of my department's graduate program (at least under the matrices of progress governing my degree advancement, since these matrices have now been changed for the incoming 2008-09 class) is that there is no clear, absolute "cut-off" date for coursework; rather, one can (and very frequnelty will see) students still taking courses up until the time they complete the PhD. Of course, I find that option immensely useful, but I can also see where it might cause some students to forget the forrest for the trees.

For now, readers might be interested in scanning the updated blog roll and links listing.

SEMA, Redux

2008-10-07T23:03:00.009-05:00

I thought I'd take a few minutes and offer a some musings about the recently passed SEMA conference. Generally speaking, and here I'm echoing comments already made on ITM (see here and here), I must say how grateful I am to Eileen Joy and all the local organizers and sponsors for putting together not only an intellectually stimulating but, most impressively, a truly convivial conference. Mille grazie!

I was unable to attend as many sessions as I had hoped -- not least because I was so beat with lack of sleep and flying in on Friday morning. I did hear Jeff Cohen's amazing plenary/meditation on rocks and Mandeville's "boundary denying ethnography." Regretablly, I missed the other plenary by Steve Kruger; I just needed some "me time" (mea culpa!). Also, due to travel plans, I completely missed the first of two BABEL sessions on "Eros and Phenomenology" -- sorry Eileen, Nicola, and others. Gratefully, however, Nicola has posted his paper as has Karl, whose paper appeared in a different session on "excrement/waste studies/fecopoetics" (which I also sadly missed!). Eileen has promised to do likewise (once she recovers).

I was involved in two sessions on Saturday, one where I presented and another where I chaired. After some rather annoying technical difficulties, the session I chaired went very well, with some amazingly interesting papers dealing with devotional literature and objects. Although all the papers were stimulating and very enjoyable, I particularly enjoyed Elina Gerstman's presentation.

My own paper was the first of four in a session devoted to Patience and Pearl; or, as I like to call it, "me and everyone else." Obviously, I mean that the other panelists were focused on Pearl, and their work gave me some very good insights into how I might connect my own arguments for a liturgical reading of Patience to certain similarly animating concerns of Pearl. Oddly enough, the panel outnumbered the audience (3 attendees; 4 panelists), but it was still a good session. My paper (see the abstract) was very much a work-in-progress, and, sadly, no one there seemed too interested in my project. That said, the best feedback I received was during a discussion with Karl Steel that Saturday evening. But I remain worried about one thing: he said it'd be great if I could make Patience an "interesting" text. Certainly, I much appreciate the support and encouragement. My worry, however, stems from the fact that this is a common judgment of the varied nature of my work on Gower, Chaucer, and others. In other words, I don't want to be--or at least just be--that guy who makes difficult or dejected texts "interesting." Anyway, as I continue to formulate a dissertation project, I'm becoming very inclined toward having Patience be a chapter. But more on that prospecting adventure later.

I was able to attend the second of the "Eros and Phenomenology" panels, which featured truly stunning papers by Lara Farina, Cary Howie, and Tony Hasler. I really enjoyed all of them, although the first two spoke most directly to my own research interests. Lara spoke about a "materialist history of reading" that would attend to the "intimate senses [of] touch, taste, smell." She further commented on how these issues are part and parcel of the "cultural management of eros in reading." But it was, above all, Cary's paper that made me shudder! I had neither heard Cary speak before, nor been much acquainted with his work other than being aware of his book Claustrophilia: The Erotics of Enclosure in Medieval Literature. No summary would do justice to his elegant, moving meditation on the "phenomenology of the body (in) waiting," about "redeem[ing] our appendages," about the impact and vitality of "undesirable proximities." Regrettably, I was unable to speak with him at the conference, but have since had a very generative email correspondence and very much look forward to meeting at Kalamazoo, if not before. His paper resonated with my own thinking about Patience, and my own ultimate desires to speak about that text's phenomenality. I find Cary's notion of a phenomenology of the "expectant body" alluring, and I think it connects nicely with my own leanings toward Jean-Louis Chretien's "phenomenology of call and response."

I'll end this post by recalling a comment that Eileen made to several of us at the pub that Saturday evening. She remarked about feeling as if "something has changed in medieval studies." Earlier (and often), Jeff Cohen had already noted that this was a conference during which one could (or retroactively would) identify a seismic shift in our field. Both Eileen and I drew on such stoney metaphors in our conversation about the "geological time" of academic work--a time that seems so utterly slow until it's so suddenly altered much as a slow but continuous river alters the rock formations and land masses through and near which it flows until it erupts through a long placed blockage to chart a new course. I think Eileen is correct: something has changed, is changing. Among other things, I find the ethically charged and phenomenologically enriched work of BABEL members to be but one of those vibrations that our disciplinary seismographs might register. We might recall that the temporality of a seismograph is always already "out of sync," for its predicative value is posited on its delayed ability to register past tectonic vibrations. However minescule or imperceptible the delay, the seismograph is never simultaneous or co-incident with that which it measures; its grammar is always that of the future anterior, the "will have been." The felt change and the hope of its continued rhizomatic movements subsists in that mutuable, fluvial interplay between (with bows to Lara) enveloping gestures of touch and/in/through pressure. If we are to continue our surface excitations, we ought to continually ask, with Cary, "What's at stake in our tact?"

SEMA Bound

2008-10-02T22:47:00.004-05:00

The overnight bag is nearly packed, and final touches are being put on my paper. My flight to St. Louis leaves Austin at 6am, so I should touch down (after a brief stop in DFW) around 9:30, at which point I'm making my way directly to the St. Louis University campus' Busch Student Center. I'm sad to have had to miss the first day of the conference, but I'm excited to get there tomorrow and connect with so many interesting folks! I'm particularly excited for the panels on "Eros and Phenomenology," that also feature a response by Amy Hollywood. I'm the first paper in my Saturday panel, which is also the only paper on Patience while the other three are on Pearl. Below is the abstract for paper. The argument remains the same, but I'm also taking this opportunity to try out a few theoretical ideas about the phenomenologies of urban flesh and prayer. See ya'll at SEMA in St. Louis!

Abstract: "Beating the Bounds": Reading Patience Liturgically

This paper builds on and extends the recent efforts of Bruce Holsinger and Katherine Zieman to examine, in Holsinger’s words, the “dynamic and dynamically changing” affiliations between liturgical cultures and vernacular writing by suggesting an alternative scenography for reading the Middle English Patience. Whereas much existing scholarship contexualizes the poem’s didacticism as sermonic exempla, this paper resituates the poem within the liturgical context of Rogationtide.

Celebrated immediately before and leading into Ascension Thursday, Rogationtide consisted of three days of pageantry and penitence amidst Easter joy and springtime harvest. Drawing on original archival research, this paper links Patience and Rogationtide in two ways. First, both poem and ritual share a body politics: just as Patience’s Jonah travels around the biblical world to escape his prophetic calling only to reveal the all-embracing reach of divine power, so too the participants of Rogationtide circumambulate their cities in processions to mark out, like dogs, their territory for divine favor and protection. In both cases, the body is more than its limbs and organs, registering its permeability by way of technology, social structures, and ritual prostheses. Here, prophet, people, and place flow into each other. Second, there is a structural correlation at the level of poetics between Rogationtide and Patience. Not only does the prophet Jonah figure prominently in each, but just as the poem retells and elaborates its biblical source, so too does Rogationtide’s longest and most ornate processional chant, Timor et tremor, trope Jonah’s story.

Reading Patience within the scenography of Rogationtide reveals a multidirectional pedagogical discourse between vernacular and liturgical cultures.

Conference: Political Emotions

2008-09-29T11:39:00.004-05:00

Well, this morning I found in my inbox an announcement for an intriguing conference on "Political Emotions: A New Agendas Conference" being held at UT-Austin this weekend. The keynote is Lauren Berlant, and features some major queer thinkers, including Gayatri Gopinath and Heather Love. I knew something like this was in the works, but wish it was later! Sadly, I'll have to miss it to attend another fantastic conference, SEMA.

Reviewing Marilynn Desmond in 995 words

2008-09-23T23:53:00.009-05:00

Well, it's been entirely too long since I posted or commented on anything. Been utterly swamped with finishing projects, TAing an ethics course for the philosophy department, and preparing for SEMA (more to come on that front).

Still, one of the "minor" (not really) projects that I finished up was my review of Marilynn Desmond's Ovid's Art and the Wife of Bath: The Ethics of Erotic Violence (Cornell, 2006). Some may remember a special session on the book at last year's Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo. My review will appear in the "Books in Brief" section of a forthcoming issue (I think the next one) of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. It was a real delight and incredibly insightful to work with the book review editor, Beth Freeman. I'm posting the review below, although it's possible that changes might still (need to) be made. Generally, I thought the book was really great, but I did have some theoretical concerns/questions. In fact, at the Kalamazoo BABEL party I had the pleasure of meeting and talking with Marilynn about the book, and she was incredibly gracious toward me. That was certainly a delight!

------
On the Receiving End
Nunzio N. D'Alessio

Ovid’s Art and the Wife of Bath: The Ethics of Erotic Violence
Marilynn Desmond
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006.
xiii + 206 pp.

After California’s Supreme Court extended marriage rights to same-sex couples regardless of state residency, The Advocate declared open season on the “Great Marriage Rush.” Featuring white-gowned and black-tuxedoed couples and the Golden Gate Bridge, the cover conjoined a homonormative rights agenda with a pioneer rhetoric of individual freedom and hard-won riches.{1} Advocating a pause before this juridical embrace, some theorists argue for a disarticulation of marriage practices from kinship structures.{2} But another potential lengthening of this respite emerges from scholarship on premodern literature, which continues complicating our easily drawn assumptions about past and present marriage politics.{3} Offering such breathing space, Marilynn Desmond’s Ovid’s Art and the Wife of Bath examines Ovid’s medieval reception in Heloise, the Roman de la Rose, Chaucer, and Christine de Pizan.

Desmond’s carefully executed readings of visual and written texts highlight intimate connections between violence and erotic desires. An opening chapter surveys the “mounted Aristotle,” a specular tradition depicting the philosopher ridden like a horse by a woman in a trope of erotic humiliation, which foregrounds anxieties about female erotic agency. Her especially rewarding second chapter reads in Ovid’s Ars amatoria a structural and mimetic correspondence with Roman scripts of imperialism and coloniality. This prepares readers for how an ironically framed imperial work became in its medieval appropriations an ethically authoritative treatise. Desmond accounts for this interpretive rupture by emphasizing how institutional apparatuses condition both what and how a text is pedagogically appropriated. For example, when treating epistolary activities, Desmond demonstrates, through appeals to the medieval handbook tradition of letter writing, how the genre rhetorically “fixed the status of the sender in relation to the addressee and thereby encoded and enacted social hierarchy,” which leads to her provocative claim that “epistolary structure replicates the structure of desire” (55-56). Equally noteworthy are comments on how illustrations and Latin commentary in manuscript page design can give any text authoritative framing. Operative in these structures is a mechanics of absorption that brought texts of disparate value systems into the medieval classroom to teach Latin within a utilitarian axiology: poetry teaches ethics because it speaks of proper desire and comportment.

Much merits comment in Desmond’s study. Both the archival survey of medieval French translations of the Ars amatoria and the excellent treatment of Christine’s source-relations prove essential. Parsing Chaucer’s reliance on the “mounted Aristotle” for his Wife of Bath’s cultural legibility, Desmond also examines how Chaucer uses first-person confessional structures to establish the Wife’s authority. A fuller appreciation of Chaucerian discursiveness emerges from Desmond’s genealogical tracing of the Wife through the Roman de la Rose: precisely when the Wife seems “most personal or authentic” she is “most constructed” (125). Throughout, Desmond enacts a disciplinary capaciousness alongside a remarkable facility with a temporally diverse set of multilingual texts. (Such comparativist strengths could have been better displayed with a comprehensive bibliography.)

Some readings will rub specialists the wrong way. But more pressing is the disjuncture between theoretical languages and very exciting textual work. Desmond rhetorically frames her study with S/M’s potential to disrupt heteropatriarchy by staging “problem[s] of ethical negotiation” (2-3). Left undeveloped is her intriguing description of much S/M writing “read[ing] like a rhetorical manual” (4). Still, it seems that S/M appears only long enough to conjure its opposite in domestic violence; wife-beating, not the desexualizing intensities of S/M, is key for her argument.

This binary between consensual and nonconsensual erotic violence breaks down at critical moments. Consider Heloise, who, because of a hegemonically carceral religious life and a clerically administered education, appears incapable of resistance. In Desmond’s hands, Heloise’s religiously imbricated life seems irredeemably oppressive; here spousal abuse becomes a Christianly permissible act.{4} But Christine de Pizan resists more effectively because cultural shifts in gender relations, Parisian bureaucratic culture, and autodidactism make possible “a less institutional and more idiosyncratic appreciation” of the Ovidian material (155). The contrast is even sharper, when Desmond declares Heloise little more than a “submissive lover” but Christine a forthrightly assertive subject (164). This not only posits religion and secularity as discrete and intrinsically agonistic spheres, it also places the locus of resistance on an externally sovereign subject. Desmond, unable to locate in Heloise’s submissiveness any tangibly resistant act, makes eroticism isomorphic with violence. A more productive reading would indicate the radical instability subtending erotic hierarchies. That structure can imply stricture need not mean the loss or irrevocable diminishment of agency, only that these are agency’s framing conditions.

Another concern is how Desmond uses heterosexuality. While sometimes highlighting its performativity, Desmond nonetheless uses heterosexuality interchangeably with heteroerotic and heterophallic, which conflates sexuality and gender within a hetero/homo frame. Conceptual dependency on such a capaciously normalizing category essentializes a discursive effect. By laminating heterosexuality onto a premodern past, as James Schultz argues, scholars allow it to “escape history” and assume a “cosmic and inevitable” status, thereby contributing to both the term’s colonization of the past and its consolidation in the present.{5} If Desmond relentlessly trains our eyes on discomforting scenes of erotic violence to demonstrate both their invitation to “ethical reading” and the presence and power of “textual violence in the disciplinary acts of interpretation,” then conceptual reliance on heterosexuality does its own discursive damage by foreclosing the sexual field within hetero/homo or conjugal frames (9).

But such criticisms cannot devalue what is an otherwise excellent and thrilling treatment of Ovid and his medieval appropriators. Argumentatively compelling and accessibly written, the book is also handsomely produced, with 37 illustrations. Specialists will benefit much from Desmond’s strengths in dealing with manuscripts and premodern rhetorical and pedagogical traditions. But queer readers might take away from Desmond a disquieting problematization of marriage: If the West remains heir to an “Ovidian libidinal economy” whereby the institutionalization of marriage not only “structures eros” but also “elicits and regulates violence” (64, 29; 116), then it seems all the more vital to not rush toward but interrogate whether these bonds are irrevocably pathological. Perhaps, then, the medieval never feels more modern than when asking, “Who’s on top?”

Nunzio N. D’Alessio is Ph.D. student in English at The University of Texas, Austin.

___________
{1} To view the cover image, see: http://www.advocate.com/toc_ektid1010.asp (accessed 16 September 2008). The California Supreme Court’s 4-3 decision, which overturned the state’s existing ban on gay marriages, was handed down on May 15, 2008 and took effect on June 16, 2008.
{2} See, e.g., Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004). I remain particularly indebted to Butler’s theory of agency, as recast here, for several of my below critical formulations.
{3} Emma Lipton, Affections of the Mind: The Politics of Sacramental Marriage in Late Medieval English Literature (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007) and Frances E. Dolan, Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). Both Lipton and Dolan situate their work with respect to contemporary marriage debates.
{4} That Christianity’s relation to erotic domination between spouses is a more ambiguous phenomenon can be glimpsed in the writings of John Chyrsostom, whose often noxious treatment of women still disallows domestic violence—a condemnation far stronger than his contemporary Augustine. See Joy A. Schroeder, “John Chrysostom’s Critique of Spousal Violence,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 12.4 (2004): 413-42.
{5} James A. Schultz, “Heterosexuality as a Threat to Medieval Studies,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 15.1 (2006): 14-29 at 20. Briefly, Schultz taxonomizes heterosexuality in three ways: as naming discrete sexual relations between men and women, claiming an orientation or identity, and describing a regulatory institutionalization. This tripartite taxonomy causes damage, argues Schultz, through correspondingly reductive analyses that make heterosexuality isomorphic with reproduction, psychosexual integrity, and marriage. The article also appears as chapter four in Schultz’s Courtly Love, the Love of Courtliness, and the History of Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Schultz is certainly not alone in questioning the signifying capacity of heterosexuality, on which see Graham N. Drake, “Queer Medieval: Uncovering the Past,” GLQ 14.4 (2008): 639-58.

A Future to Defend?

2008-09-08T12:46:00.009-05:00

Over at ITM the past few days, there's been a really generative and stimulating discussion on "defending" medieval studies. The conversation was prompted by JJC's posting of a missive he received soliciting some advice. What was intended to be and initially prompted more pragmatically focused discussions quickly became a more wide-ranging conversation not just about the institutional prospects of medieval studies but about the very morphology of a futural frame. This was itself prompted by JJC's own rearticulation of the missive's concerns in the form of "the existential question: why must we be?"

I made a few contributions to the conversation, in which I tried to discuss how academic norms not only govern and normalize but also delimit the field of intelligible action/knowledge/pleasure and the viable ways of living such delimited fields enable and sustain. My suggestion was for a strategic engagement with such norms. Readers familiar with Judith Butler's work will quickly recognize its formative impact on my thinking in this area, especially as she's raised such concerns in Undoing Gender. I especially recommend reading Eileen's two amazing comments/posts. But here are just a few tasty morsels of that conversation:

JJC's institutionally tested wisdom:

"Medievalism is a medievalist's friend."
"[M]ake the argument [to administrators] in language they know, touching upon topics they already recognize as worthy, so that you can bring them to a place at which they would not have anticipated arriving in advance."
"In order to get projects funded -- in fact sometimes just to keep a position or project alive -- you have to speak with a certainty about the future that you don't actually possess."

Eileen's joyful prospectus on curriculuar/institutional arrivants:

"compile a kind of narrative bibliography of the increasingly important role that medieval studies is playing in important contemporary fields such as queer studies, postcolonial studies, and Continental philosophy, as well as in the *historical* development of critical and cultural theory more broadly."
We "(1) work strenuously to delineate all the connections as well as fissures and cracks that inhere in various representation-event matrices....(2) explore the slower and semi-still currents of deep historical time that inhere in present cultural formations....(3) enter into active collaboration with scholars working in more contemporary fields of cultural studies and cultural theory."
"By continuing to hang on to periodization as the number one way we define our curricula as well as our job hires, we will always run the risk of what I would call the law of diminishing returns as well as planned obsolescence."
"we have to think of ways to both protect that kind of work [what I would call the right to the freedom of intellectual inquiry and historical research] while also better integrating it into new curricular models that don't simply re-inscribe little specialist ghettos"
"Any form of autonomy, held on to too tightly and defended from a too narrow trench, ultimately makes its future viability more vulnerable. Knowledge for its own sake will always be an important mantra and even an end in itself that should be vigorously defended, but when funding is the bottom-line issue, better integration of individual knowledge fields into a heteronomous university is the key. There should also be room within traditionally-structured colleges and universities for experimental/temporary "centers" or "Institutes" that would not solidify into permanent units and whose contours would always be shifting in different directions."
"Nobody ever actually gets to any one subject or idea "first"... and sometimes two or more scholars are having the same thought simultaneously in different places and with no knowledge of each other's existence, and theory, in my mind, really develops asynchronously, rhizomatically, etc., and sometimes I wish we had more scholarship that tried, as strenuously as possible, to take account of this [a more full genealogy or archaeology of ideas and forms of idea]....No one ever thought of anything "first." Ever. So it's not question of acknowledging who got anywhere "first," so much as it is a question of better efforts on our part to be paying attention to what practitioners are doing on work that we can say we always have "in common," regardless of period."
"I can only think the medieval backwards, as it were, through contemporary moments. I like to make connections, but I never claim they are illuminating as regards a "whole" history or even a continuous one. My method has always been asynchronous and anti-teleological and I mainly do it because it's pleasurable...."

Karl's rhizomes of academic desiring:

attend to the significant and continually important role of the medieval within/for current cultural formations and artifacts
How our "work and professional interest is always already caught up in desiring networks....[and that] we ourselves are cross-disciplinary. In that sense, the disciplines could be thought to inhibit the real conditions of our existence, our becoming."
on the limiting nature of a "hunt for origins": "any notion of 'first' is at its heart teleological."
"[I]t's much better to think of multiple expressions of this thing we call the 'responsible subject' rather than any simple binary of before and after interiority. The 'modern subject' is not a culmination, but a different manifestation of a set of concerns and interests that might be entirely new, but perhaps which manifested themselves differently at different times, places, and professions in the MA. I think we need a non-teleological history--even a history of a single moment in all its discursive and temporal heterogeneity--of the boundaries of the self."

Mary Kate on how life in the university is predicated on forms of belonging, of being-together.

Holly Croker's timely remarks on the problematic tendency to "conflate period, time, and field," and how difficult but necessary is the challenge to think outside narratives of linear progression.

"it seems to me worthwhile to think about the differences between temporality, periodization, and professional field. Maybe we can abandon linear temporality, but study periodization as an interpretive practice (with a history, no doubt). Then we can ask better questions about the professional politics that might result from such practices."
"When does overlooking someone else’s work cease to be oversight and take on the political power of exclusion from a professional field?....But when is that practice something that we medievalists need to redress (because we are being erased from the larger discourse), and when is it simply a byproduct of different scholars asking the same questions in different fields? Can we be okay with other scholars working on parallel questions without explicit acknowledgement? To be alongside one another, do we need recognition, in sum? If so, how do we ask for such recognition without getting tangled up within a dialectic of mastery?"

And the conversation continues there ...

On Categories

2008-08-31T18:53:00.007-05:00

Sorry to have been away and not posting, but Ive been a bit preoccupied trying to finish a few writing obligations and prepare for the new term. More on all that later -- including my promised post on Dinshaw/Manning. For now, however, I would like to solicit opinions on the following outline.

I noted in an earlier post that I'm composing the 5000-word entry on "queer studies" for the forthcoming Handbook of Trends in Medieval Studies (ed., Albrecht Classen). Be aware that my aim is to present something like a history or summary of scholarship on the topic, and not to discuss in detail and particular texts. That said, it does seem to me that much of the literary (and historical?) scholarship emerges around key textual artifacts: e.g., Chaucer, Roman de la Rose, Libro de Beun Amor, the Latin writings of Peter Damian and Alain de Lille. The texts, then, might be described as nodal points for the field's discursive energies. In fact, one way I've been thinking about a queer[ing] Middle Ages is as itself an aleatory point. There is something beautifully and thrillingly rhizomatic about queer medieval studies, something that reminds why I so love being a medievalist. Or, as Ive sometimes been "accused" of being, a theorist who uses the medieval as an archive -- an accusation in whose wake I would happily self-narrate. Still, this something is an aleatoriness that is irreducible to interdisciplinarity, and I'm coming to think more about the materialities of such academic undertakings. Perhaps a vitalist medievalism?

Anyway, back to my topic at hand. I do have a bibliography that I'll post soon. While I've been doing much research, reading, and summarizing -- and accepting the fact there is a necessary violence that must be done to the topic for this type of project -- I'm still trying to be as thorough (but not exhaustive) as possible. This means that I'm attempting to cover a range of sub-disciplines in medieval studies, since the intended audience of the project isn't just scholars of literature nor only English speakers.

So, I've been laboring over how to best organize the information in way that both makes sense and is helpful. Being pragmatic and economical are, of course, forefront in my mind. I'd would welcome any feedback and questions on or about the outline. I'm especially interested in knowing if anyone thinks I've missed anything glaringly obvious, and/or if anything in my section on "emerging issues" [anybody got a better subtitle?] seems not to belong. Note that some of these latter issues I've culled not only from what medievalists are writing about now but also from where certain trends in queer studies more generally are headed. In some ways, I suppose I'm availing myself of the performative rhetoric that such a section enables: my analysis of such emergent scholarly trajectories is as predicative as it is summarative.

Entry Outline

Overview [very brief]
• What this entry aims to do and its sections
• Introduce concept of sodomy

Orientations
• Boswell Thesis [project of CSTH and its reception and continued importance]
• Queer/ing [Foucault, queer theory] -- need a better subtitle

Geographies
• Whirling overview of selected scholarship for England [including Anglo-Saxon studies], France, Italy, Iberia [including Arabic/Islamic issues], Germany. The section is more heavily focused on the vernaculars, but will include certain important Latin writings (e.g., Peter Damian, Alain de Lille).

Vectors
• Nonconformities [discursive overlappings of heretics, Jews, Saracens w/ sodomites]
• Visual and Aural Cultures [scholarship from art and music]
• Law, Pedagogy, Medicine [yeah, sort of a catchall, I know]
• Godly Eros [religious desires/erotics] -- better title?

Between Women
• Historiographic issues in the study of female same-sex eroticism [I think this is important enough to deserve a separate treatment]

Emergent Issues
• Hetero/sexualities
• Temporality
• Eccentric Bodies & the Otherwise Gendered [disabilities, eunuchs, trans]
• Senses [esp., aural and olfactory erotics; fecopoetics/"waste studies"]
• Animals
• Being Alone [singleness, anti-sociality, solitude]

Meine Freunde.

2008-08-16T23:52:00.006-05:00

As the world stands in awe at the swimming phenomenon that is Michael Phelps (with whom I share a hometown!), I also wanted to draw everyone's attention to another important fight. While this one doesn't have the same glory or even gold medals, it's certainly an important one for medievalists. Below is the text of a forwarded email I have received:

The University of Heidelberg plans to close down the Medieval Latin Department. There are not many departments of this kind left in Germany --it would be wonderful if you could sign a petition against closing down the Medieval Latin Department where e.g. Walter Berschin taught very successfully for many, many years! It is always very helpful when scholars from abroad sign the petition, too.

You may link to the petition here. It had previously been hosted on the Department's website until the University Chancellor forbade it.

Manning & the Politics of Touch: Aleatory Reading, Picky Reading

2008-08-13T23:15:00.011-05:00

Over at the always interesting Larval Subjects [LS], there was a post that articulated precisely my own reading habits:

One should never read a single book at a time. In the act of reading multiple texts, aleatory encounters between texts are produced like sparks arcing across two separated wires. There is no method here. Where and when such a spark will leap is not subject to calculation or prediction. Rather, such sparks are purely a product of chance. And, of course, it is necessary to add the caveat that it is impossible to read a single book at a time. As Freud famously observed in his allegory of the Roman city, and Bergson in his cone of memory, the past co-exists with the present, such that any act of reading is necessarily saturated with all the previous texts one has encountered. Yet even here the points at which texts touch one another, the point at which virtual texts and actual text touch in singularities, is entirely aleatory and without calculation. It is always an event. Perhaps there must be an Idea, Problem, or Multiplicity at work– in Deleuze’s sense of the word: a problematic field –that presides over the genesis of such relations. The principles of auto-synthesis are murky.

Although I've read parts of Dinshaw's Getting Medieval for years now, I had surprisingly not read the entire text from cover to cover, which I finally did a little more than a week ago. After finishing Dinshaw, I found myself compelled to pull Erin Manning's recent book, Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty (University of Minnesota, 2007), off my "to read" shelf. Alongside Manning, I am also reading a number of works in medieval queer studies/theory, writings on temporality, and Seth Lerer's A Portable History of English, among other things. What LS calls the "aleatory sparks" that occur when reading multiple books simultaneously, the way different texts "touch in [their] singularities," seems particularly arresting in relation to Dinshaw. Despite the 'murkiness' of the "principles of auto-synthesis," I will attempt in my next post to read Dinshaw alongside and across Manning; to allow these two texts of very different historical moments to reach-toward one another. What makes such an experimental reading so suggestive is not only the obviously shared concern of both authors with a metaphorics of "touch" but also the ways in which Manning uses certain theorists (esp., Deleuze, Derrida, and Nancy) to complicate precisely what such a sensing body does. There are moments when I read Dinshaw's text where, despite my own profound affection for her project--I find Dinshaw utterly arresting in both her prose and her theoretico-political imaginings--I am left feeling empty. Something seems absent from the text, a something that I think Manning begins to help us reach-toward. My next post will formulate these ideas.

But first, I want to be a slightly picky reader. There is, to my theologically trained former self, an error at n13, p. 167. The text as printed reads:

"The Word: (o logoß). Logoß is from legw, an old word in Homer to lay by, to collect, to put words side by side, to speak, to express an opinion. Logoß is common for reason as well as speech. Heraclitus used it for the principle that controls the universe (Oxford English Dictionary)."

The note itself is glossing a discussion of the opening verse of the prologue from John's Gospel: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." The error itself is typographical. Before commenting further, let me say that I find Manning's text to be theoretically astute, and so I offer the following correction in a spirit of charity.

Firstly, the phrase "o logoß" fails to take account of what in Greek are called "breathing marks." These, like accents (which Greek also has), affect pronunciation. In the Greek text, they appear as inverted commas standing either over the minuscules (lower case letters) or next to the uncials (upper case letters) at the beginning of a word. The letters requiring such a mark are: a, e, i, o, u, w, r. These marks are of two types: smooth and rough. Technically, the smooth mark has no real affect on the pronunciation, while the rough signals a required "h" sound at the beginning of the word. This may sound trivial, but there are certain words in Greek that are spelled identically and are only differentiated by a smooth or rough breathing mark. That scenario isn't present in Manning's text; rather, one of the most elementary words in Greek is the definite article "the" which is transliterated as "ho" and not "o."

Secondly, the typography of both the nominal and verbal forms of logos are incoherent. The sigma ( an "s") that ends the nominal form isn't the German letter "ß"; rather, in Greek there are two minuscules for sigma, employed depending on where in the word the letter falls. The most common form is "σ," and occurs in all letter positions except if the sigma concludes the word, at which point the alternative form, "ς," is used. Similarly, in the verbal form the final letter is written "w," when in transliteration it should appear as a long "o," since it is in Greek an omega (ω) and not an omicron (ο). [Note that the Greek alphabet differentiates between long and short vowels for certain letters.] As it stands, typography for the verbal form appears to be some kind of hybrid, neither really a transcription nor a transliteration.

Ok, I know, maybe this is TOO picky. I apologize if this comes off as unwarranted nagging. Thoughts? Am I just being, well, a you know what? .... I will confess that my Greek is fairly rusty, but that I was still able to notice these errors even on a first glance.

Reading Abbreviations

2008-08-09T18:01:00.000-05:00

So in the course of following various links, I came across something that all us medieval geeks should appreciate: Karl Maurer, a classicist at the University of Dallas, has assembled a list of the most common abbreviations used in the apparatus of a critical edition. I'd also recommend reading Eric Knibbs, "How to Use Modern Critical Editions of Medieval Latin Texts," History Compass 5, no. 5 (2007): 1521-49.

Briefly Noted

2008-08-08T12:07:00.001-05:00

Just a few quick announcements

CFPs -- as we all continue to prepare abstracts to meet the deadlines for Kalamazoo and Leeds next year, here a few other conferences that have come to my attention.

Locating Gender, the theme for the annual conference sponsored by King's Collge, London; 9-10 January 2009 (CFP due 1 September 2008).
Deleuze2008, a conference marking the 40th anniversary of Deleuze's Difference & Repetition; 7-8 November 2008 in Stavanger, Norway (CFP due 12 September 2008).
Glossing Is a Glorious Thing, sponsored by The Graduate Center, CUNY; 9-10 April 2009 (CFP due 1 October 2008).

Also, a new and exciting venture from the cutting-edge folks at GW, the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute, or MEMSI

And lest I forget, a new collection of essays, edited by Jeff Cohen, is now available for purchase: Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages: Archipelago, Island, England. You can read the introduction here.

Summer Days, Drifting Away...

2008-08-07T16:54:00.001-05:00

Since concluding my recent UK trip, I now have three major projects that require my attention.

The entry on "Queer Medieval Studies" for the forthcoming Handbook of Trends in Medieval Studies, edited by Albrect Classen and being published by Walter de Gruyer. (due end of August)
Editing my review of Marilynn Desmond's new book, forthcoming in GLQ (due September 15 or before; I'm editing based on Beth Freeman's very helpful comments)
Reviewing Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England for Sixteenth Century Studies (past due ... mea culpa!)

The queer studies entry is my first priority, and much of this will be bibliographical assembly. I anticipate sharing that bibliography on this blog next week (hopefully), and seeking suggestions for under-represented areas. The entry is suppose to discuss/cover multiple disciplines in medieval studies, and not only English literature. I feel confident about my coverage in several areas (e.g., Middle English, romance languages, Latin literatures, musicology, history), but certainly welcome any and all suggestions! I've already been aided by Michael Johnson, of UT-Austin's French & Italian Department and a BABEL member, and am expecting an email from Bob Mills of King's College, London, on art history resources other than some of the more obvious items (e.g., Michael Camille's work).

I'm also planning posts on (the) queering (of) medieval disability studies, responses to a few articles I've recently been working through, and a detailed post related to the retrospective discussion of Carolyn Dinshaw's Getting Medieval happening over at ITM.

... Oh those summer days!

Baswell, NCS, & Eccentric Bodies

2008-08-04T00:18:00.001-05:00

As promised in my previous post, I am sharing my notes and thoughts about Chris Baswell's passionate NCS plenary. Many will already be familiar with discussions about medieval disabilities. But if not, one should consult the excellent guest blogging of Greg Carrier and Alison Purnell on ITM, along with Greg's own lively blog and the recently established Society for the Study of Disability in the Middle Ages. I'm planning an additional post about medieval disability studies and queer theory, but for now I present my summary of Baswell's talk from my trusty, compulsively annotated moleskin. I confess, however, that I was so moved by Baswell's passionate identification with his "med-crip images" that my notes are more rudimentary than usual. When stock is taken of "med-crip" theory's emergence as a critical modality, as Jeff Cohen has already predicated, Baswell's talk will surely take its place as a field-altering moment. It was nothing short of arresting.

Titled "Before the Pardoner, Before the Cook: Eccentric Body Cultures Prior to Chaucer," Baswell's talk came at the conclusion of the NCS plenary session on "Before Chaucer," which featured brief, often entertaining, presentations by Valerie Allen, Clare Lees, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne and Baswell himself. A key terminological difference marking Baswell's work is signaled through his titular preference for "eccentric bodies" rather than using the term "disability," which only emerges into English language and culture in the 17th century. For Baswell, "odd bodies were all over the place in the Middle Ages." Such "eccentric bodies" were often also hypersexualized bodies. Baswell describes the effects of these and other abjecting rhetorics evocatively as "melting toward[s] non-being." He also made mention of how attention ought to be given to the wider "social care group" that surrounds and enables the med-crip, as illustrated above in the Luttrell Psalter, an image Baswell also used in his talk. Another area of attention that Baswell encouraged was a focus on what he termed the "trope of miracular cure." He concluded with an ethical summons: "To recover premodern eccentric bodies is to recover possibilities of identity."

Swansea Recap

2008-08-01T18:38:00.001-05:00

While there have already been a number of posts elsewhere on the recent gathering of the New Chaucer Society in Swansea, Wales (see, e.g., here, here, and here over at the medieval group blog ITM, along with several on the Humanities Researcher ), I wanted to add my own reflections before too much time elapsed. I came to NCS immediately after the major Gower conference in London -- even traveling with a buss load of Gowerians from London to Swansea! The Gower conference itself was an amazing success thanks to the extraordinary work of Bob Yeager, John Hines, and Bev Stewart. Bob mentioned to me that a volume will be produced from this conference, which I think will be an important contribution to Gower scholarship. I gave papers at both the NCS and Gower conferences, and will comment on those experiences and their content later. Now onto Chaucer.

This was my first NCS, and I enjoyed it very much. I was able to meet a number of very interesting people, many of whom attended the earlier Gower conference, so that it felt like I was vacationing with a large group of great friends. I generally felt that the atmosphere was convivial, but can understand how some might feel that there was posturing going on, although anytime you bring academics together in such an intimate setting I think such posturing is inevitable. I also feel, along with Jeff Cohen, that many of the papers seemed not very (or at all!) rehearsed. This certainly added to much frustration. Other major conferences I attend supply printed or online abstracts that make it more helpful in determining whether a paper is worth attending or not, since titles are so amorphous and often altered.

Since I'm a compulsive note-taker, I had my trusty moleskin with me. What follows are summaries, based on my notes, along with my some interjected commentary. Much attention has already been given by bloggers to the amazing papers by Carolyn Dinshaw and Chris Baswell. I will deal with Baswell in a separate post, but I do want to say something briefly about Dinshaw's paper and her session as a whole.

Carolyn Dinshaw's "The Lay of the Land: Queer Love in A Canterbury Tale," used the 1944 Powell and Presburger film referenced in her title to consider the questions: "What's so strange about a man who loves his land? What makes this so traditional of affections queer?" With characteristic elegance, she attended to the manifold ways in which the "down-hearted antiquarian" Culpepper is a "queer conservative coopted for nationalist" by unpacking the relations between person, place, and perversion. The film's operative companionability, as described by Dinshaw, was one of an "interdependence of the human social world and the natural world," where such "nature [was] animated by the touch of the human." This haptic quality is also a bounded temporality, since the "land as touched by humans" is also "what remains from that earlier touch into the future." To this end, the "mutual love of place isn't individual but social," and from this Dinshaw teases out how the materiality of place is an affectional, even erotic, preference. The title character, Culpepper, wants to bring men to love of land, and he does this through extremely misogynistic acts of nocturnal discipline. Here, to me, the "ugly disenchantment of war" seems to coalesce with the maniacal energies of a queer national imagining. Still, with her most seemingly of innocent opening questions, Dinshaw asked us to think deeply about the possibilities of "queer love of place," even and perhaps especially when such love finds itself in the negative grip of nationalist longings. But Dinshaw also demonstrated how what she termed this "most traditional of affections," the relation between person and place, resists and even repels absorption into any liberatory scheme. Despite his seemingly conservative desires, Culpepper's love of and kinship with place so exceeds and transgresses the properly objectal relations of place and person. So, Dinshaw helps us, once again, to see the operative perversity within the ostensibly normal. There can thus be something enabling about contemplating the disruptive perversions of local desires for place.

The last day of the conference featured an interesting panel on "Gender vs. Sexuality." I offer below some thoughts, comments, and summaries of some of the work its panelists presented.

Bob Mills, "Back to the Future, or Temporal Drag"

"What's queerest about the category of sodomy is its tendency to overlap with other categories" (e.g., religion, nature)
"What does it mean to feel the backward tug of certain critical terms?" In asking this, Mills pointed us toward Beth Freeman's work on the potential productivity of the temporal tug backward.
In an aside, Mills noted how medievalists have much to contribute to the history and theory of transgender.
Reminded us anew that sexual modes of dislocation are not isomorphic with sexual activity; that it's "not just a field of love objects but an intersectional field of bodies, objects, and spaces/times."

Catherine Sanok, "Temporal Virgins"

Invoking Butler's work, Sanok asked us to consider anew rather than assuming whether gender is an effect of sexuality in the Middle Ages. In Sanok's reading, the medieval is a crucial period during which gender becomes an effect of sexuality. The suggestion here, as I understand it, is to consider gender as detached from sexuality.

Glenn Burger, "Becoming Undone"

Burger pointed how "thinking in terms of oppression and resistance has lead to the recovery of marginal voices but [that] it also obscures what might be asked of this evidence."
So, rather than operate according to the "binaristic logic of the 'versus'" Burger suggests "turning to a logic of the 'beside'" (as this is articulated in Sedgwick's Touching Feeling).
Much of Burger's talk was taken up with his current project on the "good wife" within the theater of marriage. In his analysis, the "good wife" and the "good man" are co-articulated regimenting principles; that the wife's body is an extension of the husband's such that there is a transgendered dynamic inscribed within the gendered logics of male-female desire; that masculine authority is always articulated in conjunction with femininity; that we see the "good husband" within wider discourses.
Her concluded by invoking Butler's recent work on being "undone" as a way of rethinking/remaking the human.

Diane Watt and Clare Lees, "Queer Talking: Sex, Gender, and Collaboration"

This co-delivered paper seemed principally focused on what's at stake in collaborating on projects about gender and/or sexuality where what is critical is the creation of "place where disagreements can be productive rather than threatening." These presenters wanted to resist that assumption that "underlying the act of collaboration [is] an imperative to concur."
Lees pointed how how Old English studies is slow in discussing the affectivity of/in religious texts
Asked us to consider not only where but whose are the Middle Ages.

There's so much more than can be noted, but I will leave that for other posts. What strikes me most about these papers, as I look over my moleskin notes, is how much they coalesce around thematics of affect and time. More to come on this....

Introduction

2008-08-01T00:09:00.000-05:00

Welcome, and thanks for visiting my new blog!

My hope is contribute to the ongoing intellectual activities that have emerged in the blogosphere by offering another place to discuss issues in cultural studies, medieval and early modern literatures, continental philosophy/theory, gender/queer studies, affect and public feeling, and postmodern religion, among other topics. What this blog will not do is engage in divisive political, socio-cultural, or ad hominem attacks or commentary. The blog roll lists what I consider exemplary models for my announced blogging hopes; I hope to add many more links, so please suggest others (or your own!). In the future, I hope also to engage guest bloggers.

Forthcoming posts will focus on recapping and unpacking my recent U.K. conferencing and research trip. I will also be participating in the annual book discussion over at In The Middle. This year we're discussing Carolyn Dinshaw's vitally important, beautifully crafted, and ethically resonant Getting Medieval.

Please come back often and comment frequently!