Feminized Judaism (Kristeva and Dworkin)
"The pure/impure mechanism testifies to the harsh combat Judaism, in order to constitute itself, must wage against paganism and its maternal cults. It carries into the private lives of everyone the brunt of the struggle each subject must wage during the entire length of his personal history in order to become separate, that is to say, to become a speaking subject and/or subject to Law." (95)1
Pagans and their idols of Goddesses appeared juvenile to those that discovered the One. Like I wrote in part one, the separation of the pure and impure, holy and unholy in the Old Testament parallels the psychoanalytic separation of the child from the mother when he enters the law of the father. Pagan worship of the feminine "intermixture" or the "forgotten vagina," where there are only phases, fluids, transitions and intensities, stunts patriarchal power predicated on clear distinctions and taxonomies. Judaism has only the absolute Law necessary to make logical opposition/binary/dichotomy out of anything that is pure.
Something that I wanted to address in Andrea Dworkin's Right-wing women which I couldn't make space for in this essay was the chapter on Jewish alliances with far-right America. Dworkin argues that Christianity's effort against Judaism was a feminizing one, which I noticed is like what Kristeva describes Judaism as having done to defeat Paganism. She writes that "it was Paul's genius to exploit Christ as the prototypical Jew--he suffered like a female, it was his passion, an ecstasy of agonized penetration--and then to have the resurrection of Christ symbolize a new nature, a Christian nature: it dies, then rises."
Saint Paul was also intent on making Jewish law appear culturally contingent to its time. This propped up Christian law as alternatively infallible. Dworkin: "Turning something holy, from God, into something cultural, the work of a group of corrupt men, is to turn the absolute into the relative". Just as much as Judaism accused Paganism of adopting the loose boundaries of their bleeding Goddesses, Christianity rose against its predecessor by deeming its separations and distinctions as insufficient. One of the most obvious feminizing arguments is the equation of circumcision and castration.
Dworkin ultimately argues that Israel's modern manifestation is an effort for Judaism to reclaim its masculinity. "Israel is a militarist nation: no one will ever again accuse the Jews of being soft … Israel, of course, makes Jews more male: owning land, controlling a state, having a nation, having an army, having borders to defend and to transgress." A constantly parroted justification is that every ethnicity has its "right" to a state. If this is taken to its logical conclusion, that everyone has their right to a border, every individual has their right to separation, every ego has its right to separate from the mother, then we come back to that law that Freud discovered in the myth of brotherhood: every man has his right to a woman, distributed equally as sanctioned by the incest taboo.
Liberal mommy issues
"At any rate, that evocation of defiled maternality, in Leviticus 12, inscribes the logic of dietary abominations within that of a limit, a boundary, a border between the sexes, a separation between feminine and masculine as foundation for the organization that is "clean and proper," "individual," and, one thing leading to another, signifiable, legislatable, subject to law and morality." (102)
I want to look at the reference to the "individual" in this quote. On Kagi small web I came across the article, "Adam without liberalism." It argues that liberalism arose from a certain biblical interpretation, specifically made by Locke, Hobbes and Malthus. While it seems to have been published in a deeply religious journal, and Marc Barnes seems to be implying that Malthus' is the wrong "interpretation" as opposed to some correct one, I only want to focus on the idea that liberalism is not as secular as it supposes.
To summarize, the liberal interpretation of Genesis is that Adam began as an individual, and that his relation with Eve is the precarious confrontation of two individuals rather than the workings of "an original society of male and female in dynamic relation with their Creator." His tilling of the Earth is made the imperative of survival and competition for limited resources rather than a "creative transformation." I'm sure you can hear the echoes of Malthus here.
The implication is that this material world of scarcity is evil, and following the same logic of Plato's Idea, of which Luce Irigaray critiques and that I discuss in part one, the enlightened reason of the mind is good. I immediately think of Kristeva when Barnes writes of the "original (and sinful) state of being mixed up with torpid matter"; maternal intermixture and its boundary-breaking blood must be suppressed for the rule of the symbolic order.
Just as much as the material world is made lack rather than abundance in the liberal mind, the abject excesses of the mother are made the impurity of religious Meaning in the "Semiotics of Biblical Abomination." Irigaray calls this the result of man's struggle to achieve "primacy in reproduction." Men overcompensate for their fear of the boundary-less mother by reproducing their separation from her over and over again, by making separation inherit to law and to language, to the "rights" of the individual and to all on which we may draw a border.
Menstruation
Kristeva uses leprosy as an example of the physical manifestation of the law of separation in Leviticus. "the disease visibly affects the skin, the essential if not initial boundary of biological and psychic individuation" (102). I would like to say that menstruation is also a threat to that boundary between the biological and psychic. For women to (partially) enter the patriarchal order of the symbolic, their excesses must become lack. The vagina can no longer be something transitory in-between the inside/outside, a confusion of the binaries that construct all Meaning and Law, but a negative inversion of the penis, a mirror's distorted image of man that can be simply reconstructed with the science of optics. Regularly bleeding from what is supposed to be an empty void is then impure because "the body must bear no trace of its debt to nature: it must be clean and proper in order to be fully symbolic" (103), the symbolic that is "the exclusion of anything that breaks boundaries (flow, drain, discharge)" (104).
Kristeva elaborates further in the later "Waste-body, corpse-body" section:
"Contrary to what enters the mouth and nourishes, what goes out of the body, out of its pores and openings, points to the infinitude of the body proper and gives rise to abjection. Fecal matter signifies, as it were, what never ceases to separate from a body in a state of permanent loss in order to become autonomous, distinct from the mixtures, alterations, and decay that run through it. That is the price the body must pay if it is to become clean and proper." (109)
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