homme est mort?

Authorship, for example, Pauline authorship of Pauline and Pseudo-Pauline letters, is an idea fostered by Enlightenment notions of the self and Lockean concepts concerning the ownership of property; it is of vital importance for some Christians to believe that the apostle Paul, wrote, for example, Ephesians, because he is the owner of the text, the subject that imparts wisdom, and therefore he owns it, and he belongs to the apostolic tradition and therefore Paul’s writings are inerrant because Paul wrote them (Paul being the subject/author, which Foucault said was “dead”). Why is it important for Paul to be the author? Because of our own concepts of ownership, which remain foreign to the Greco-Roman project of writing, which includes secretaries such as the one Paul uses in his their letter to the Romans.

-- from "Fridays with Foucault" by Rod, at his blog 

Political Jesus:Stromata on Christianity, Politics, Sports, and being so chic and cutting edge

The above is Rod's example of what Michael Foucault meant when he authored the words, “homme est mort.”  This is quite important because Foucault was very much alive when he wrote what he wrote and when somebody else also alive translated that into English as, “man is dead.”

So where does author-ity come from?  And who exactly does a text come from?  Well, you and I are reading all of this, aren't we?  We're participating in meaning, in meaning making, in meaning construction, and in meaning deconstruction, aren't we?  This is some Rod's point, isn't it?  It's one of his points, you see, don't you?

But I want us to step back a bit here.

I'm not going to go all postmodern on you, as one of my blogger friends accused me of doing.  (He meant it not the way I took it -- as a compliment).   I'm also not trying to be difficult, as another of my blogger friends charged me with.  (And he was not trying to be kind).  I am wanting us together to listen.  Listen to what oppressive men write.  Listen to how the oppressed write.  Listen to how you write.  How I write.  Here goes:

To try to pin "authorship" on the likes of Enlightenment men like Descartes or modern(ist) men such as John Locke seems like a bad end game.  Yes, I know how they tried to distance themselves from the perhaps more-collaborative and, therefore somehow, more-inclusive "Greco-Roman project of writing."   However, these fellows all are playing King of the Mountain, it seems to me.  (Someone could even write a dissertation on how influenced by certain Greeks, namely Aristotle, writers like many Roman men, and most anti-Aristotelian Enlightenment men, and more modern modernist men were.  And didn't they all, like Aristotle, try to be brighter than the next guy, even to the point of calling Aristotle names like unEnlightened and pre-modern and such?)  The whole system of authorship and ownership is older probably, I think, than history.  Sometimes it's the point of history to have authority over and to own.  Which is why Canada and the United States of America do well to take a month of each year for 'Black History Month' and then 'Woman History Month.'  By the people, red and yellow black and white, for the people, men and women, and of the people, the governments can for a couple of months allow authority to get checked.  This isn't just intellectualism or political correctness gone haywire.  There are consequences to who owns texts and how they are owned.  There is deconstruction and reconstruction and civil rights re-rightings to be done.  There is recovery and reviewing and rewriting to be done.

If we were a Jewish-Ukrainian polyglottal Portuguese-writing Brazilian named Clarice Lispector, yes even a woman, then we might call the typically male notion of "author-I-ty" how Mario Vargas Llosa, Marilyn French, and Hélène Cixous (in their 1996 project together) translate Lispector describing "It":

the ‘phallocratic system,’ the [author-It-ative] ‘system of inflexible last judgment, which does not permit even a second of incredulity’

The thing to note, and Cixous does this well, is that

Lispector herself ‘did not think in terms of phallogocentrism.’  How could she?

If we were an African-American woman named Toni Morrison whose Nobel Prize for Literature allows an opportunity to think on these things with an audience, then we would not think in terms of phallogocentrism either, would we?  No.  How could we?  What kind of authority is that?  Rather, we'd listen, as her griot, the wise blind woman, "the daughter of slaves, black, American, [who] lives alone in a small house outside of town" listens.  Yes, it's Toni Morrison.  She's thanking the Nobel committee out loud.  She is telling a parable like Jesus would.  She might be telling on us, like Nathan told on David by letting David tell on himself.  Here's a story thrown beside (y)our own.  Listen (if there are ears to hear):

She is worried about how the language she dreams in, given to her at birth, is handled, put into service, even withheld from her for certain nefarious purposes. Being a writer she thinks of language partly as a system, partly as a living thing over which one has control, but mostly as agency - as an act with consequences. So the question the children put to her: "Is it living or dead?" is not unreal because she thinks of language as susceptible to death, erasure; certainly imperiled and salvageable only by an effort of the will....

She is convinced that when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, indifference and absence of esteem, or killed by fiat, not only she herself, but all users and makers are accountable for its demise...

The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. 

Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek - it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language - all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.

The old woman is keenly aware that no intellectual mercenary, nor insatiable dictator, no paid-for politician or demagogue; no counterfeit journalist would be persuaded by her thoughts. There is and will be rousing language to keep citizens armed and arming; slaughtered and slaughtering in the malls, courthouses, post offices, playgrounds, bedrooms and boulevards; stirring, memorializing language to mask the pity and waste of needless death. There will be more diplomatic language to countenance rape, torture, assassination. There is and will be more seductive, mutant language designed to throttle women, to pack their throats like paté-producing geese with their own unsayable, transgressive words; there will be more of the language of surveillance disguised as research; of politics and history calculated to render the suffering of millions mute; language glamorized to thrill the dissatisfied and bereft into assaulting their neighbors; arrogant pseudo-empirical language crafted to lock creative people into cages of inferiority and hopelessness.

"It" is that ‘system of inflexible last judgment, which does not permit even a second of incredulity’ - "Author-I-ty" is that ‘systematic looting of language ... recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation.’

Now when we go back to thinking about Paul as a writer, as a collaborative writer, as not so in authoritative control of his text as an author should be, then can't we see how we might start thinking about ourselves?  If you are not oppressed, or if your parent or your grandparent or your great-grandparent wasn't, then there's something going on.  Without wanting to side or to take sides, maybe you already have.  Then there really are other sides here.  Can Paul write something that keeps slaves slaves?  That keeps wives submitted and silent?  That keeps gays damned?  And if you hear that "he" does write these things, that the text does say that, then what?

How about we listen a little more to what Dr. Vincent L. Wimbush says in  True to Our Native Land: An African American New Testament Commentary?

      Here are the radicalism and power of the interpretive stance taken and shared by [Toni] Morrison  and [W. E. B.] DuBois and so many other critics of African American life--that for black and subaltern critical consciousness there is no meaning in any Western-translated narrative, script, text, and tradition unless such is first ripped, broken, and then "entranced," blackened, made usable for weaving meaning.
      The metaphors here and throughout my article are mixed; they rather deliciously and poignantly run amok. Speaking so -- "in other words" -- is necessary in order to address complexity and pain and trauma. "Ripping the veil" means refusing to think according to and live dreamily within the realm of doxa, the realm of the canonical. It means accessing the sites of memory. Social therapy can begin only when these memories on their own terms -- not behind the "veil" of canonical text -- are woven together or "(re)textualized" (in the original meaning of that term) as "scriptures." And in agreement with writer-critic Ishmael Reed, it may mean, with ramifications most radical, that ultimately "we will make our own future text."

through Toni Morrison, Paul, LXX Translators, Hosea: Beloved

      Beloved has been and continues to be interpreted in myriad ways, with many different types of interpreters representing many different angles, agendas, and perspectives, responding to what appears to be [Toni Morrison] the author's invitation to read and probe and discuss the book.  There is raging debate still about the character Beloved--whence she comes, who or what she represents, the meaning or import of this or that statement or action attributed to her/it, whither it/she goes.  But all interpreters generally agree that Beloved is a story about a haunting, the haunting of those who are survivor-heirs of the "sixty million and more" made to undergo the Middle Passage (and to whom the book is dedicated).  It is a story about the failure on the part of all of us to remember those who died in such an experience.  It is about the refusal of those who died to go away and remain forgotten; it is about the haunting of the memory of those who died.  It is about why and how the memory of those who died is prevented, held back, made difficult or impossible to embrace.  Why the memory persists.  Why it hurts, traumatizes.  It is about consciousness, the impact the haunting has on the black soul, on the black consciousness.  It is about the impact of the loss of memory, the prevention and refusal of memory upon the black soul.  It is also ultimately about how the black soul may be reconstituted, healed, and united.  So it is also consciousness, interpretation, and articulation about the terms on which, and the framework within which, the black self, the one who is survivor-heir of the Middle Passage may now look back, remember, interpret, negotiate, and speak to the world about what it thinks, how it feels, and how it travels and experiences.  It is about "ripping the veil" that prevents the black self from remembering and healing itself.  It is a pointing in the direction in which the psychological-social stitching, weaving work can be carried out.
      Although it is clear what character in the book does the haunting, not entirely clear in every part of the book is the matter how the haunting is to be understood, that is, how the haunting works, why it persists, what the haunting is really all about.  It should occasion little surprise that I would notice and want to exploit, as very few other interpreters have, Morrison's epigraph, which is taken from Paul's letter to the Romans (9:25), and which also supplies the name of the character for whom the book is named:

I will call them my people,
Which were not my people;
and her beloved,
which was not beloved.

      No argument need be made about the importance of epigraphs in summing up a writer's agenda.  What I want to stress here is the importance of the epigraph in naming the issue behind the (narrative plotline) issue.  In order for this to be clear, it is important that the larger context of Paul's statement (actually a quotation of Hos 2:25, with word agreement with the LXX of 1:9) be established.  The larger discursive-argumentative context is Paul's effort to address the believers at Rome of mixed background ... regarding what appears to be ... an ironic, even paradoxical twist of fate and circumstance -- the phenomenon of the turning to God in great numbers on the part of Gentiles.... Paul tries his best to clarify matters; it does not work.  His arguments are halting, elliptical, and confusing....
      I think it is important to note that the end of the larger section, Romans 9-11, in which the the prophetic statement that Morrison used for her epigraph is found, Paul sums up....  At the beginning of the larger section Paul engages in a wonderful play on the word "call" (kaleo) before he draws a conclusion regarding the "mystery."  It is this word and Paul's play with it -- that is, signifying on it as marker of "hidden meanin'," of paradox -- that seem to draw Morrison's attention and inspire her usage.
      Morrison seems to have applied the Pauline "mystery" that equate "the call" (as election) and being called "beloved" to her book and black existence.  She renders the historical and perduring exclusion and marginalization; the historical enslavement, the other-ness, and subjugation; and the hoped-for elevation and self-possession in society and culture of black peoples mysterious.  Paul's rendering of Hosea's being called "beloved" is translated by Morrison as black folks' coming to be loved.  So it seems that what is most mysterious is the matter of how they were first enslaved and how they can or may come to be healed, elevated.  In Morrison's thinking -- through Paul [ -- through the LXX translators -- through Hosea] -- black peoples are the Gentiles, the ones thought at first to be outside, at first considered marginals, slaves, in terms of some grand design.  And just as mysterious a thing happened with the Gentiles of Paul's day, as even they were brought into the fold, so black folks, according to Morrison, are destined to be "called," to be loved.

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above, an excerpt from the chapter "We Will Make Our Own Future Text," by Dr. Vincent L. Wimbush, in  True to Our Native Land: An African American New Testament Commentary.  (HT Rod)

submissive status: Hosea, other texts, & their misuse

       The informality of household instruction was reinforced by the more formal attentions of [white] Yankee clergymen [in the late 1700s]. Ministers like Cotton Mather and John Usher commonly inquired into the conduct of their black parishioners, continually urging them onward in the Christian life. Ministers also catechized groups..., preaching special sermons to the black members of their congregations and lecturing to black religious and social associations….
      The social aspects of Christian fellowship at first must have been more attractive to potential converts than the theology preached to the servant population. The religion tendered slaves was not the Weberian Puritanism of the protestant ethic; instead, slave religion inculcated servility and Augustinian acceptance of menial status and submission to authority. In New England, as throughout the United States, Protestant Christianity was presented to slaves as a defense of the status quo.
      Christianity, as Cotton Mather noted in his Catechism for Negroes, made better servants, since blacks who knew God would also know their proper place….
      Among the texts used by [white] New England ministers for special lectures to the blacks were Luke 14:16-24, Ephesians 1:5-7, Psalms 68:31, Romans 5:12, Jeremiah 5:4, Job 27:8, and Hosea 13:13. Lorenzo Greene contends that prominent among themes was emphasis upon faithful service and abstention from theft and fornication; but conversion is the most important theme in the texts noted above. Comparatively, the favorite text of sermons to slaves in the Old South was Ephesians 5:5-8, “Servants obey in all things your masters.”

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above, excerpts from Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth- Century New England by the late Dr. William D. Pierson, History Professor, Chair of the History Department, and Chair of the Division of Social Sciences at Fisk University.

marriage metaphor: Hosea & its Misuse

The image of God moving from pathos to pathology can be problematic in black communities as it potentially affirms acts of desperation and violence against women by suffering black men.  In black communities, even though leadership is prominent among black women, patriarchy unfortunately still is assumed....  Unfortunately, black men's suffering has often led to pathological responses, including the beating, public humiliation, and even murder of women who could not otherwise be controlled....

Reading under, behind, within, and over Hosea renders a complex, intriguing, and problematic interpretation that can either lead to new possibilities or reify old habits and beliefs.  The writings of this eighth-century prophet as composites of an ancient, patriarchal worldview are rife with language that oppresses women, thus thwarting the potential for liberation and redemption among the whole community.  One must not choose among oppressions, for if one group is oppressed, ultimately all are in bondage.  The fascination with other cultures parallels modern economic prosperity concerns for the church, which often have no interest in justice.  Inclusive justice heightens questions regarding ongoing tensions about segregation versus integration, particularly when commitment to mutuality and inclusivity is not present.  The pathological Yahweh/Hosea characterization reflects how twenty-first-century leadership can corrupt congregations and society.  Can this God be redeemed?  This misuse of the marriage metaphor may have served as the catalyst for many an act of domestic violence--psychological and physical.  Where we go from here with Hosea is a respect for the text, a suspicion of what it says, and caution when it comes to interpretation, proclamation, and engagement.
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above, an excerpt from the chapter "Hosea," by Rev. Dr. Wallace S. Hartsfield II, in The Africana Bible: Reading Israel's Scriptures from Africa and the African Diaspora.  (HT David Ker)

Sifting: An African American Woman Reading

below, an excerpt from her chapter "Sirach," by Dr. Naomi P. Franklin, Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Virginia Union University, and Preacher at Pilgrim Journey Baptist Church, in The Africana Bible: Reading Israel's Scriptures from Africa and the African Diaspora.  (HT David Ker)
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      For Africana people, Sirach [also known as Ecclesiasticus, written by Jesus son of Sirach and translated into Greek by his grandson] is problematic, for it contains misogynistic advice and negative advice about slaves.  However, alongside that negative information, one finds constructive advice about living.  His [i.e., the author's] teachings are contradictory.  In one chapter, he speaks of the "wickedness" and "anger of women" (25:13, 15), yet in the very next one he speaks about the happiness of the man who finds a good wife (26:1).  His greatest appreciation seems to be for a silent wife, seeing her as a gift from the Lord (26:14).  This reflects the influence on Sirach of Hellenism, with its narrow view of the place of women in society and its negative view of women ([Claudia] Camp ["Becoming Canon: Women, Texts and Scribes in Proverbs and Sirach"] 2005: [page] 377).  For Africana women in particular and the community in general, these teachings must be eschewed.  Likewise, readers will find the negative advice about slaves and their treatment disconcerting, given our long and tortuous experience of slavery.
      While Sirach is part of the corpus of Wisdom literature, there is much within it that cannot be considered wisdom in the modern context.  His advice regarding women and children and how to live in society must be sifted in order to find that which can be useful in a modern context....

Rape and Ruth: the woman and the text

      Marriage is a contentious category in the United States as some are asking who can and should marry, others are demanding the right to marry as a fundamental civil and human right, and still others are insisting on preserving a particular biblical paradigm.  But marriage is a normative category in most of Africa and Asia.  At the same time, the normative experience of black women in the Americas who do not marry shapes a reading of [the book of] Ruth that may not be congruent with Africana readers in other contexts for whom marriage is normative.  Asian and Africana readers frequently share a sense of cultural familiarity with the story of Ruth because of the focus on the mother-in-law/ daughter-in-law relationship, the cultural and societal vulnerability of widows, and the necessity of producing live offspring, preferably male, to secure a woman's status and economic well-being and that of her family.
      As an Africana reader, I am particularly interested in how issues of translation affect how scriptures are read, heard, understood, and interpreted in the broader African diaspora.  In a working paper on African feminist postcolonial biblical interpretation, Musa Dube notes the rarity of women on committees responsible for major translations of the scriptures (such as UBS; this is also true for NRSV, JPS, and others) and the tendency for translators and their translations to advance the aims of empire.  Construction of gender and gender roles, including marriage and motherhood, is one well-attested aim of empire.  An Africana translation-sensitive reading of the book of Ruth calls into question the virtue and value of Ruth's marriage to Boaz even as it recognizes the import of marriage in the ancient and contemporary African and Asian contexts from which the scriptures emerged and in which they continue to be venerated.
      The normative portrayal of marriage in Ruth is a particular problem for English readers because it masks sexual and domestic violence in a text that has been canonized as scripture for Jews and Christians.  There are at least three indicators that Ruth was abducted into marriage:  (1) the use of the verb ns', "lift," with "woman," instead of the standard lach, "take (as wife)," (2) the long-standing Israelite practice of abduction or rape-marriage, and (3) the preferential abduction of foreign women for rape-marriage.
      The verb in Ruth 1:4, vayis'u, from ns', "to lift" or "pick up," may be taken to indicate that Ruth and Orpah, both Moabite women, were abducted into marriage.  I translate the first three works of Ruth 1:4, "They-abducted for-themselves Moabite-women. . . . "  The verb ns' occurs 661 times in the MT.  The primary meaning of ns', according to The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (HALOT), is "to carry" or "to lift."  In virtually every translation of ns' in which the object is not a person, the verb is rendered with some form of "lift," "carry," "take," or something similar.  Any thing or person may be the object of ns':  the hand (Deut. 32:20), prayer (Jer. 7:13), or sin may be lifted off of a person or community (Isa. 53:11), and so forth.  In Ruth ns' is also used to indicate lifting grain in 2:18.  Women are the object of ns' five times:  Judges 21:23; Ruth 1:4; Ezra 10:44; 2 Chr. 13:21 and 24:3.  Note that in Judges, the context is the abduction of sexually naive girls from Shiloh into forced or rape-marriages for the purpose of progeny.  The verb chtph in Judges 21:21, "to catch" (women), functions as a synonym.  In Ezra, the women in question are specified as foreign.  In 2 Chr. 13:21, Abijah's collection of women and the resulting offspring is cited as evidence of his strength in the previous verse, suggesting that these were abduction-marriages....
      The normative verb indicating marriage in the Hebrew scriptures, lach, "to take," with a woman as the object, indicates in every case in the Hebrew scriptures socially sanctioned union (Gen 4:19; Exod. 6:20; Jer. 16:2, and so on)....  Rape-marriage as a normative practice is introduced in Numbers 31, where sexually naïve girls are abducted as "booty," shalal.  It is codified subsequently in Deuteronomy 20,21, and 24.  Among the modifications introduced are the shift of focus from any outsider girl whose people are designated as "enemies" (as in Num. 31:19) to "beautiful" women and girls among the enemy (Deut. 20:11).  Deuteronomy20:12-13 also calls for the abducted women and girls to be stripped, their heads shaved, and their nails cut....
      .... The very name, "Moab," literally "from [my] father," evokes the alleged incestuous and therefore despicable nature of all Moabites according to the Israelite account of their origins in the Genesis 19 account of Lot and his daughters.  As a result, Moabites, particularly Moabite women, are highly sexualized in the scriptures of Israel, as are many contemporary Africana women readers of those same scriptures.
      Given the specific vocabulary deployed in the text and Ruth's identity as a Moabite woman -- which she never escapes -- Ruth is multiply marginalized, socially and sexually vulnerable.  Ruth and Orpah's marriages, therefore, hide dirty not-so-little secrets, covered up by generations of male translators.  Yet the experience of abduction-marriage and forcible pregnancy is not unimaginable to contemporary Africana readers.  In some parts of Eastern and raped into marriage.
      The Associated Press (AP) ran a story on June 21, 2005, under an Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, dateline in which a twelve-year-old girl, kidnapped by men who wanted to force her into marriage, was rescued by three lions that chased off her abductors and guarded her until police and relatives located her.  Sergeant Wondimu Wedajo of the local police reported that the men had held the girl for seven days, repeatedly beating her:  "Often these young girls are raped and severely beaten to force them to accept the marriage."
     The AP report noted that in Ethiopia, kidnapping has been part of the marriage customs for quite some time and that the United Nations estimates that more than 70 percent of marriages in Ethiopia occured by abduction, particularly in rural areas where the majority of the country's population lives.  (The AP report did not delineate its sources).
      Interpreters appealing to biblical narratives to describe idealized marriage have in many cases legitimized violence in marriage.  Religious authorities (Bible translators, pastors, seminary professors) have been negligent (and, I argue, criminally so) in failing to expose the ways in which the biblical narrative sanctions and contributes to the abuse of women in general and wives in particular.  By highlighting Ruth's embrace of Naomi and Naomi's god, interpreters of the book of Ruth have regularly overlooked the colence with which Ruth was initiated into marriage (and relationship with Naomi), as specified by the Biblical Hebrew vocabulary of that union.  Biblical interpreters, like all readers, are shaped by their own constructed cultures, which they in turn lay onto the text even as they identify "biblical principles" for marriage.  In doing so, lay and professional, clergy and academic interpreters of the Bible overlook the violence in which many women live, particularly in their marriages.  Men in every part of the world rape their wives.  According to Molly Egan and Jason Wood's 1999 Lehigh University report, The Abolition of Marital Rape Exemption, in the United States, spousal rape was criminalized by only seventeen out of fifty states in 1996.  By 2007, all fifty states and the District of Columbia had criminalized spousal rape.  (The state of New York relies on the ruling of an appeals court in 1984, People vs. Liberta, because an exemption for married men accused of raping their wives remains on the books.)  Spousal rape affects all people in the United States and beyond, including those in the African dispersion.
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above, an excerpt from the section "Marriage," in the chapter "Ruth," by Wil Gafney, in The Africana Bible: Reading Israel's Scriptures from Africa and the African Diaspora. 

HT David Ker