power identity violence the decline & fall: esther


*

"PAUL's
genius to transcend
"Israel in the flesh" ~
continued":

~*~

~*~


PORPHYRY EXPOSES
with rare incandescence
the intimate connection
between the corporeality of the individual
and his or her connection with
"race,"
filiation,
and place
and the neoplatonic revulsion
from both.



AS
Porphyry writes of his hero Plotinus,
it was Plotinus's disdain for the body that led him to disdain as well race,
parentage, and
native country.



THE
Pauline move,
while considerably less extreme in every way
than that of Paul's younger [by a century] near contemporary,
was very similar
in structure.



I am proposing
that Paul's there-is-no-Greek-nor-Jew
grew out of substantially the same platonistic cultural themes
that drove a Plotinus.



THIS
interpretation
furnishes us a key to understanding
the resistance of the Rabbis
to platonism
as well.



IF
commitment to "the One"
implied a disdain for the body,
and disdain for the body entailed an erasure of "difference,"
then commitment to such differences
as race,
parentage,
and native country
entailed a commitment to the body
and to "difference"
in general.



THE ancients
certainly well understood
the connection between
notions of the body
and ideologies of
ethnic identity.



AS
I will try to show,
this issue is inextricably bound up
in the feminist controversy
on essentialism;
now,
just as in antiquity,
the issues of ethnicity and gender
are inextricable,
and analogies between Jews and women
can be pursued
for productive
purposes.



THERE
are ways
in which
gender is to sex
as ethnicity is
to race,
an analogy that will,
moreover,
call into question
both sets
of oppositions.



~*~



As Etienne Balibar has argued,
the very way that the modern individual is valorized in an opposition
between universal and individual, on the one hand,
and the particular and gregarious, on the other,
reestablishes a hierarchy that performs exactly the same function
as to old racism:

This latent presence
of the hierarchic theme today
finds its chief expression
in the priority accorded tot he individualistic model
[just as, in the previous period, openly inegalitarian racism,
in order to postulate an essential fixity of racial types,
had to presuppose a differentialist anthropology,
whether based on genetics or on Voelkerpsychologie]:
the cultures supposed implicitly superior
are those which appreciate and promote "individual" enterprise,
social and political individualism,
as against those which inhibit
these things.

THESE
are said to be
the cultures whose "spirit of community"
is constituted by
individualism.

In this way,
we see how the return of the biological theme is permitted
and with it the elaboration of new variants of the biological "myth"
within the framework of a cultural
racism.



~*~



IN OTHER WORDS,
by placing a certain model [a Protestant, Paul-derived model]
in a superior position as Culture vis-a-vis cultures within which significant aspects of identity and practice are derived from the group,
the ideology of individualism reinscribes the precise hierarchy op people
[West and East, or North and South]
that racism had.



My point is not, of course,
to argue that PAUL and his modern posterity
are somehow complicit with racism
but rather to show that either ideology, in itself,
can serve racist ends,
understood as the organization of hierarchical structures
of domination between
groups.



The insistence
on the value of bodily connection
and embodied practice emblematic of Judaism since Paul
thus has significant critical force
over against the isolating and disembodying direction
of western idealist
philosophies.



THIS
very critical force is,
however, not devoid of its own dark and
frightening
aspect.

~verliefdliefdesverdrietverliefd~
engel
28 aug 2005 - bewerkt op 21 mrt 2008 - meld ongepast verhaal
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