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

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...

...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)

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

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:

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

AAR, Montreal -- Paper Accepted

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...

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!

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

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.