Técnicas e instrumentos de recolección de datos

which value is expressed in terms of an abstract, universal, and in itself substance-free standard: the coin, the Phallus, the father, the Logos. By interpretation I mean virtually all of our methods of formal response to texts by which the text is taken to mean something, by which meaning is extractable from a text and presentable, even if incompletely and not exactly, in paraphrase. Even the most extremely antiparaphrastic of western interpretative methods, for instance the poem-interpretation of the New Critics, still is infinitely more paraphrastic than midrash, which simply refuses to take even the text as verbal icon, preferring almost to read each word, and sometimes each letter, and sometimes the shape of the letter or even its serifs, as a virtual icon in itself. One way to bring this point home would be to insist that even according to those who would argue that “a poem must not mean but be,” the poem remains at least partially translatable. With the modes of linguistic operation that are characteristic of early midrash in place, the text is simply untranslatable (something on the order of the untranslatability of Finnegan’s Wake). Too many of the features upon which midrash founds its meanings are simply artifacts of the materiality of the language in its Hebrew concreteness.

Midrash is the dominant mode of commentary in a signifying economy without the “universal equivalent.” Famous by now is the moment in talmudic legend when God himself seeks to intervene in midrashic interpretation and is informed that he has no status whatsoever since the

majority of the sages disagree with his interpretation. In commentary, at any rate, for the Rabbis, even the deity is not the measure of all things.

It is fairly well accepted by now that midrash does not intend to give an interpretation of the text, interpretation being understood here as a particular kind of commentary; it does certainly function as the most seri-ous kind of reading and commentary on the most authoritative and holy text that Judaism knows. As Simon Goldhill has remarked,¹ any practice of commentary implies a theory of language. The apparent eccentricity of midrash, its frequent seeming extreme incoherence from the point of view of what counts as commentary in our culture, has to be explained, therefore, via a theory of language. Language itself is embedded in whole systems of signifying practices.

These signifying practices through which rabbinic culture differs all involve a denial of platonistic splits between the material and the ideal.

Marxian classicist, George Thomson, has proposed a direction for think-ing about this issue in remarkthink-ing the novelty of the platonic revolution in consciousness (although carefully avoiding, correctly, assigning this revolution to the person of Plato himself):

As Plato says, the soul is by rights the ruler and master, the body its subject and its slave. This dichotomy of human nature, which through Parmenides and Plato became the basis of idealist philosophy, was something new in Greek thought. To the scientists of Miletos, as to the Achaean chiefs and to the primitive savage, the soul was simply that in virtue of which we breathe and move and live; and although, the laws of motion being imperfectly understood, no clear distinction was drawn between organic and inorganic matter, the basis of this conception is essentially materialist. The worlds of Milesian cosmology are described as gods because they move, but they are no less material. Nowhere in Milesian philosophy, nor in the Homeric poems, is there anything that corresponds to this Orphic conception of the soul as generically different from the body, the one pure, the other corrupt, the one divine, the other earthly. So fundamental a revolution in human consciousness only becomes intellegible when it is related to a change equally profound in the constitution of human society.² It is this revolution in consciousness that also enabled the idea that mean-ing is abstractable from the matter of text, that the words are bodies and the meanings, souls. The Rabbis, it could be said, in the end developed out of their powerful rejection and renunciation of Logos theology a consciousness more similar to that of the “scientists of Miletos [Thales and

Anaximander]” than to that of Parmenides, Plato, and most of European thought in their wake. We might refer to their activity, then, as a counter-revolution in consciousness.³

My hypothesis is that midrash came about within rabbinic culture as the product of a complex politics of resistance to logocentric thinking, owing in large part to the Rabbis’ efforts to define themselves over-against the growing hegemony of orthodox Christianity.⁴ As logos theology grew into Christology and as “Israel” became a signifier whose signified was not the historical people of Israel, the Rabbis deferred the logos and undid, as it were, the Parmenidean revolution with enormous cultural consequences.⁵

Froma Zeitlin has clarified that the very foundations of philosophy, as a specifically European practice (analogous, of course, but not identical to practices in other human cultures), are grounded in:

…bring[ing] together phallus and head…for the ending of the [Oresteia] is also concerned with a shift in modes and behavior, as it charts a progression from darkness to light, from obscurity to clarity. Representation of symbolic signs perceived as a form of female activity gives way to the triumph of the male Logos. Repre-sentation and lyric incantation yield to dialectic and speech, and magic to science. Even more, this “turning away from the mother to the father,” as Freud observed, “signifies a victory of intellectuality over the senses.”⁶

Zeitlin proceeds to provide an extensive list of the ontological oppositions grounded in the primary opposition of male as Apollo and female as Erinyes that grow from this “turning” or “victory”⁷ and that are characteristic of Greek philosophy from some pre-Socratics to Plato and Aristotle. Freud, however, quite mistakenly assigned this “turning” to biblical culture.⁸ Biblical culture, however, did not make this move toward idealism, toward what Jean-Joseph Goux has called, quite brilliantly, paterialism, and rabbinic culture was to shake it off.⁹ Both remained as materialistic at least as the Milesian scientists. Biblical and the classic form of rabbinic culture (as manifested in the Babylonian Talmud) resists the abstraction of the male body and the veiling of the penis that produces the phallus, and forms, accordingly, a subdominant fiction within the cultural space of the dominant fiction.¹⁰ This subdominant fiction is no less oppressive than the dominant.¹¹

No Logos, no Phallus:

But the truth psychoanalysis tells us about the logic of truth, and thus about philosophy, is “that the feminine occurs only within models and laws devised by male subjects,” that this model “is a phallic

one, [which] shares the values promulgated by patriarchal society and culture, values inscribed in the philosophical corpus: property, production, order, form, unity, visibility…and erection.”¹²

Neither in hermeneutical strategies nor in the production of philosophical (as opposed to mythical) documents do the texts of the classical rabbinic period indicate “the passage from mythology to philosophy.”¹³ No one would characterize rabbinic culture as being one in which “order, form, and unity” are dominating values, and there is, as I have already empha-sized, no philosophical corpus at all.

The identification of Logos with Phallus is not an artefact of a modern attack on the “west.”¹⁴ Neoplatonic texts are unabashed about this equa-tion. Plutarch writes:

And that is the reason why they make the older Hermae without hands, or feet, but with their private parts stiff, indicating figur-atively that there is no need whatsoever of old men who are active by their body’s use, if they keep their mind [or their power of reason, Logos energon], as it should be, active and fertile.¹⁵

For Plutarch, as for the later Plotinus, it was so obvious that the stiff private parts of the Herm were not related to the “body’s use” that he didn’t even have to argue the point; he could assume that his readers would understand it implicitly. Plutarch doesn’t need to tell us that the phallus is the logos or why this should be so; he can assume that we already understand this and then applies this assumption to the interpreta-tion of the Hermae. In other words, Plutarch’s rhetoric here suggests that this association had become virtually commonplace by his time. He may be innovating in his interpretation of the Hermae, but he can’t be with respect to the meaning of the phallus, or his very comment would have been incoherent or even laughable to his readers. The stiff Phallus of the Herm simply is the Logos!¹⁶ This would be an absurd statement for a tal-mudic Rabbi. Theories of signification are thus deeply imbricated with and implicated in theories of sexual difference.

No Logos, no Phallus, no father. The symbolic role of the father had also not been fully realized within rabbinic Judaism. As Pietro Pucci has well summed up a virtual topos:

The father comes into being not by sowing his seeds, but with the Logos: for only humans have a father, though animals are often begotten like humans. A father is a figure that, within the strategies

of the Logos, acquires a set of meanings and functions … In a word, he may be equated to a sort of transcendental signified.¹⁷ The father simply does not have that transcendental status in early Jewish culture.¹⁸ Although the father had power over the mother, and is distinctly marked as more important socially, the difference between father and mother functions with respect to the child is not marked symbolically within rabbinic culture. Both have the same ontological status vis-à-vis the child; in short, the father-function is not removed from the system of

“commodities” of kinship relations. On the other hand, it must be emphasized that since such “transcendental status” did remain the prerogative of the distinctly male deity (only God, one might say, has the phallus),¹⁹ without the possibilities of transcendence of gender that Platonism and Christianity offered to both men and women, the lack of phallus certainly did not issue in a rabbinic Judaism less male-dominant and androcentric in its social and cultural discourses.

As Goux, once more, has perspicaciously phrased it: “Western civiliza-tion is not patriarchal in the sense in which certain societies have been or still are patriarchal. It is pervaded by the abstraction of the Father.”²⁰ Among these “certain societies” is surely classical rabbinic Judaism, an ideal-type, in this sense, precisely of a patriarchy, because the father was not an abstraction. The abstract “father” in the western civilization is an exact parallel to the abstract phallus. The father for the Rabbis is not a transcendental signified (for all his power and privilege) but a physical genitor exactly like the mother, just as the penis in that culture (for all its socioreligious significance) is no less an organ and a part of a body than is the vulva. Rabbinic Judaism, I suggest, is not pervaded by the abstraction or the Name-of-the-Father; rabbinic Jewish society was undoubtedly pervaded by the power of fathers.

Of course, rabbinic interpretation, as all reading, was constrained and produced by rabbinic ideology and the struggle for hegemony and exclusion of many voices from the community; it, nevertheless, remains the case that certain characteristics of rabbinic textuality can best be described, on my hypothesis, by seeing rabbinic thought as nonlogocentric (this is not in any way to be taken as celebratory, nor, of course, as pejora-tive, but hopefully as usefully descriptive). The Rabbis might indeed be designated by that ancient heresiological label, the “Alogi.” By a kind of theological askesis, the Rabbis, in their nativism and their rejection of Christian platonism, denied themselves virtually all of the forms of abstraction that enable the production of philosophical texts and of interpretation in the senses in which we understand those terms. The point is not that only Rabbis make midrash—we have seen and will see

more that that is not the case—but rather that the Rabbis don’t make philosophy, don’t make allegory, and don’t make paraphrastic interpreta-tion. In a situation in which midrash is the only form of response to Holy Writ it has a different function and a different significance from a system in which other modes of commentary function alongside of it. Similarly in a system of signification within which narrative (viz, the Gospels and Acts of various types) appears alongside of other types of writings (the Epistles, apologetic literature, systematic theology), narrative will have a different significance than in a system such as the Talmud within which only narrative signifies religious (and other) ideas.

The late Babylonian Rabbis seem to be articulating and acting out an hermeneutic practice of dissemination of meaning and fracturing of tex-tual organicity: the shattering of the Logos, like the breaking of the atom, I suggest, released an enormous stockpile of hermeneutical energy, the sparks of the Logos. That practice can certainly be better apprehended by us in the light of the denaturalization of metaphysics of language which Derrida has endeavored to perform, and provides a kind of model for a nonlogocentric reading practice. Through one of the accidents of history, it is perhaps this odd confluence that has given a possibility for a renewed (but critical) recovery of Jewish différance in our own time.

A useful philosophical description of the condition of midrash (without necessarily claiming that the Rabbis would or could have articulated it in this fashion) can perhaps be hazarded using the terms of Samuel Wheeler who has directly addressed this issue. In his work, Wheeler articulates the under-taking of a (surprising) joint project in the philosophy of language between Jacques Derrida and the American analytical philosopher, Donald Davidson:

The fundamental point of agreement between Derrida and Davidson, as well as other thinkers in the analytic tradition, such as Quine and Wittgenstein, is their denial of what I call the “magic language.” This is the language of nous, a language that is, in Wittgenstein’s terms, self-interpreting. The magic language is the language in which we know what we mean, think our thoughts, and form intentions. There is no question of interpreting sentences in the magic language, since the magic language is what interpreta-tion is interpretainterpreta-tion into. Furthermore, there is no quesinterpreta-tion of discovering what the terms of the magic language mean, since the terms of the magic language are nothing but the meanings expressed by words of natural languages.²¹

In discussing Derrida here, Wheeler is referring to several different early Derridean texts in which these ideas have been articulated and have

proved formative for the (post)modern study of midrash. These ideas go back to the very foundational moments of Derrida’s work as early as his Speech and Phenomena.²² In that work, he elaborated his crucial concept of iterability. The linguistic sign, by virtue of being a sign, is necessarily repeatable in other contexts and thus of having other meanings. While, as Wheeler points out, “On an occasion of utterance, of course, the intention would clarify the meaning of the utterance,” intentions themselves are something languagelike (as Wheeler puts it) or simply language (as I would prefer).²³ The only possibility for intention, and thus interpretation, to be fixed would be to imagine a perfect language of nous, such as that which virtually all philosophers from Parmenides, through Plato and Aristotle, and the entire tradition have explicitly posited. That perfect language, which Derrida calls by one of its names, Logos (the name that Parmenides gives it), is precisely the “magic language” (in Wheeler’s terminology) that Derrida’s grammatological work has set out to displace philosophically. In the classic works of his early writings, Of Grammatology and Writing and Difference, Derrida has further pursued and worked out the details and implications of such a nonlogocentric account of language and texts.

Having dispensed, I think, with apologetic, celebratory accounts of rabbinic Judaism as proto-deconstruction (or proto-analytic philosophy!), I can assert that the denial of a “magic language” that attended the late rabbinic construction of a religious community defined by its alogocen-tricity gives us an example of what commentary without such a “magic language” might look like and thus an important way of desublimating Derridean theory via the close study of an actual historical practice, analo-gous perhaps to the benefit that would accrue if somewhere we could find people who actually construct their perceptions of the universe on non-Euclidean interpretations of geometry. Pursuing this investigation further is one of the major goals of my current research.

References

1. Simon Goldhill, “Wipe Your Glosses.” Aporemata: Kritische Studien Zur Philologiegeschichte.

ed. Glenn W. Most. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999), pp. 380–425.

2. George Thomson, Aeschylus and Athens: A Study in the Social Origins of Drama (London:

Lawrence and Wishart, 1973, 1941), p. 147; The First Philosophers (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1955), vol. II of Studies in Ancient Greek Society, p. 239.

3. See Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture, The New Historicism:

Studies in Cultural Poetics 25 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 5–6 for further elaboration of this point on the anthropological level. Cf. also Boyarin, “The Bartered Word: Midrash and Symbolic Economy,” Aporemata: Kritische Studien zur Geschichte der Philologie 4 (2000): 19–65, but cum grano salis. This is an area that I hope to further illuminate in a work that I am just beginning now, tentatively titled, Sophisticated Rabbis.

4. Cf. Thomson, The First Philosophers, p. 100 on the unique set of circumstances that pro-duced the biblical prophets.

5. It needs to be said that this formulation requires much more specification and detail, since, as Virginia Burrus has impressed on me, Nicene Christianity constitutes just as much a rejection of Logos theology. In my forthcoming Border Lines: The Idea of Orthodoxy and the Partitioning of Judaeo-Christianity, Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religions (Philadel-phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), I hope to provide a much more nuanced account.

6. Froma Zeitlin, “The Dynamics of Misogyny: Myth and Mythmaking in Aeschylus’s Oresteia,” in Playing the Other; Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature, Women in Culture and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 87–119 (111).

7. Zeitlin, “The Dynamics of Misogyny,” p. 112.

8. As Zeitlin remarks, “Freud’s view of the female as a mutilated male lies squarely within the Aristotelian doctrine of the woman as a ‘deformity in nature’” (“The Dynamics of Misog-yny,” p. 111, n. 49), and see continuation there. See also Daniel Boyarin, “‘An Imaginary and Desirable Converse’: Moses and Monotheism as Family Romance,” in Reading Bibles, Writing Bodies: Identity and the Book, Biblical Limits (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 184–204. Charles Shepherdson has contributed another valuable insight for this discus-sion: “Indeed, when Freud speaks of ‘the force of an idea’ in order to explain the basic distinction between psychoanalysis and organic medicine, every reader of Heidegger will note that this ambiguity characterizes a long philosophical tradition, and is internal to the

8. As Zeitlin remarks, “Freud’s view of the female as a mutilated male lies squarely within the Aristotelian doctrine of the woman as a ‘deformity in nature’” (“The Dynamics of Misog-yny,” p. 111, n. 49), and see continuation there. See also Daniel Boyarin, “‘An Imaginary and Desirable Converse’: Moses and Monotheism as Family Romance,” in Reading Bibles, Writing Bodies: Identity and the Book, Biblical Limits (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 184–204. Charles Shepherdson has contributed another valuable insight for this discus-sion: “Indeed, when Freud speaks of ‘the force of an idea’ in order to explain the basic distinction between psychoanalysis and organic medicine, every reader of Heidegger will note that this ambiguity characterizes a long philosophical tradition, and is internal to the