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Essays in Books by Yael Cameron
Sexuality and Ideology: Queer readings from the Antipodes [Sheffield Phoenix], 2015
This essay explores a transgressive reading that is the surplus of any reading of the biblical So... more This essay explores a transgressive reading that is the surplus of any reading of the biblical Song of Songs and Hélène Cixous's The Book of Promethea that is characterised by openness to difference. The reading could be described as bisexual that leads to a break down of phallic mono-sexuality and reprioritising of the body in a redemption of human animality.
The Bible and Rape Culture. Eds. Katie Edwards, Caroline Blyth and Emily Colgan. Palgrave MacMillan, 2018
ZImri and Cozbi: I’ll be honest with you. I want to save them. I want to save them both. I want ... more ZImri and Cozbi: I’ll be honest with you. I want to save them. I want to save them both. I want to stop death from coming. I want to hold back Phinehas. I would take his poisoned spear and throw it to the side. I would tie him up and prevent him from this catastrophe, to stop him before he enters the tent. But each time I read this text death comes again.
I receive this vignette in the Hebrew bible as if I had happened on a set of photographs or splices of film. The climax of the reading is that final blood soaked spectacle. The pure narrative of the text is not encyclopaedic. It is patchy, blurry, and out-of-sync, as if pieced and rejoined as a mosaic of scenes that only loosely align. But, for all the words, the reader is left with the dramatic and horrid finale, an image; a slice from the reel of film that devastates. But, for all of this, it’s a terrible love that I bear this text. It is a love as strong as death. It is like fiery coals. It burns me up and leaves me gasping with its torment. It’s like a revolving door. I read anew, another time, and behold the couple are resurrected. In each reading they take those same fateful steps past the sanctuary to Zimri’s tent and death comes after them spear in hand every time. It is a fate that cannot be turned away from them. They are doomed the moment they enter the camp. But also, I, in rereading the text, it is as if I murder the couple continually. I don’t want to believe it but it’s true: “The loving couple is outside the law, and the law is deadly for it …” (Cixous). As reader, I participate with the law.
Creation and Hope (Eugene, Or: Pickwick, 2018), 2018
As in the extract from Rilke’s ‘Eighth Elegy’ that begins this essay, the other-than-human in the... more As in the extract from Rilke’s ‘Eighth Elegy’ that begins this essay, the other-than-human in the world is an object of curiosity, mystery and denigration. Derrida’s 1997 Cerisy lectures “L’animal que donc je suis [à suivre]” aligns itself with Rilke’s mood in its desire to be with or for rather than in spite of the animal. In his first lecture, Derrida speaks of the difference between nudity and animal non-nudity. He speaks of the beginnings of the civilized world. The beginnings of literature and of language. He reveals his shame. He speaks of cats in literature; and of poetry and passion. He speaks of sacrifice.
Derrida’s survey of the question of the animal in Genesis penetrates into the heart of animal theology. Much of the Western theological tradition has interpreted the hierarchical distinction between the animal and the human as ratified and limned with divine authority in the first pages of the Judeo-Christian sacred text. Thus in Derrida’s rewriting and re-interpretation of Genesis, he is firstly recognizing the power of these texts that are lodged at the heart of the question of the animal and then offers an ‘other’ reading that deconstructs this dominating theological narrative and the ways in which it is made manifest. Likewise, in the Western philosophical tradition the animal has been an invisible and mute companion—easily set aside—and , as Derrida will claim, the historic span of this consequential monologue about the animal has done little except to further underline the false dichotomy of the human-animal relation. In this situation Derrida offers a reading of hope: a new relation, and this means looking into the face of l’animal as a divine moment...
The Bible and Art: Perspectives from Oceania, Eds: Caroline Blyth, Nasili Vaka’uta [Bloomsbury], 2017
Derrida is naked at the beginning of Genesis in L'animal que donc je suis. In the first Cerisy l... more Derrida is naked at the beginning of Genesis in L'animal que donc je suis. In the first Cerisy lecture, 1997, he brings us to an imaginary; the time before time, at the founding of the world.
He appears naked here in order to cross a certain border. To return to that moment when a boundary had not yet been fashioned. The break or the separation, the division of waters from waters, and flesh from flesh. As Derrida writes, he goes there 'to surrender to the animal'. He goes to the time of the animal, when the animal was also the man, a living creature: nepeš ḥayah.
Papers by Yael Cameron
Women's Studies Journal, 2021
An exploration of the film/novel "Disobedience" (Naomi Alderman) with reference to a biblical and... more An exploration of the film/novel "Disobedience" (Naomi Alderman) with reference to a biblical and Jewish lesbian history; discusses the violence of sacred texts towards the lesbian community.
Stimulus: The New Zealand Journal of Christian Thought and Practice, Jul 1, 2013
For the last four weeks the final year education class at Laidlaw College has been studying human... more For the last four weeks the final year education class at Laidlaw College has been studying human development. They have not only been thinking of biological or cognitive development, but there has been a special emphasis on the rich questions of human development forming around notions of humanness and human being. They have been asking questions like 'what does it mean to reach one's potential?' And 'what does it mean to flourish?'
Hecate, 2014
The life of a tallith; which is not mine, the tallith of death. I am condemned to weave it only, ... more The life of a tallith; which is not mine, the tallith of death. I am condemned to weave it only, to touch my hands upon the threads, but once the weaving is done, I have lost it. It becomes his. Wait, I must finish it, and then secretly unravel it.
Showing Theory Press eBooks, Feb 28, 2022
Stimulus: The New Zealand Journal of Christian Thought and Practice, Jul 1, 2012
... Stimulus: The New Zealand Journal of Christian Thought and Practice. Volume 19 Issue 2 (Jul 2... more ... Stimulus: The New Zealand Journal of Christian Thought and Practice. Volume 19 Issue 2 (Jul 2012). Educated guesses: Sacred journeys and transformational learning. Klangwisan, Yael 1. Abstract: Genesis 12 begins the famous reading called in Hebrew, Lek-l'ka (Go forth!). ...
The murder of Cozbi is a clear incidence of gendered, sexualized violence, recounted in the Hebre... more The murder of Cozbi is a clear incidence of gendered, sexualized violence, recounted in the Hebrew biblical book of Numbers. Drawing inspiration from Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida and Helene Cixous’ Angst, Yael Klangwisan takes an unflinching look at the bloody spectacle of Numbers 23. Employing Barthes’s photographic categories of studium (the wider scene or spectacle) and punctum (an element that punctures the scene), she teases out this biblical tradition relating the murders of Zimri and Cozbi by Hebrew priest Phinehas, recounting the litany of horrors in such a way that the reader is refused the distance and the sang-froid offered by the narrator. Comparing the biblical tradition with other classical love tragedies, Klangwisan then considers this literary trope in depth, moving towards her own, alternative ending for Cozbi’s story, where, in the spirit of Cixous’ rereading of the Tristan and Isolde legend, “love and life are victorious.”
Stimulus: The New Zealand Journal of Christian Thought and Practice, Apr 1, 2014
Review(s) of: The following reflection on animal suffering and the problem of evil was presented ... more Review(s) of: The following reflection on animal suffering and the problem of evil was presented at the book launch held, by Laidlaw College in August 2013. Stimulus is pleased to publish it as a further response to this significant book.
Stimulus: The New Zealand Journal of Christian Thought and Practice, Jun 1, 2019
Stimulus: The New Zealand Journal of Christian Thought and Practice, 2015
Lisa: So I've been thinking about transformation and formation and the places where we notice... more Lisa: So I've been thinking about transformation and formation and the places where we notice these processes taking place, particularly in counselling.
Hecate, 2016
I dream-read a book. It was a book about the Christian God, written by a woman. That in itself is... more I dream-read a book. It was a book about the Christian God, written by a woman. That in itself is a mystical amazement: a delightful aberration. A theology that has breasts, a womb, an-Other libidinal economy. As I have already written, I was dream-reading this book. I say "dream-reading" because while I read, cerebrally, in good faith, in the deeps of my body and my mind, such writing always calls to the subterranean and the beyond. And there I was reading at the border listening to the echoes from the other shore. This woman who wrote about God had never been only invested in the cerebral. Her text's journey intersected deity with viscera. And for me, that gut-deep writing is always already about the body, its avowal and its disavowal. To be sure, I did dream vividly during the time I read, while I read, waking dreams, and dreams of the night, nightmares. This is the richness of the woman's theological work, and the way it calls to blood and tissue. I had dreams of encounters, dreams of raptures, dreams of the dark and far face of God, but also I was plagued by nightmares of rapes and endless violations. I was dream-reading through the ages of Christendom, I think, mediated and framed by her theological eyes. But in the most restless of my deeps, I found no place to sit down, I kept running like Solomon's Shulamite, kept looking for gardens, fountains, for life in what so often appeared to me as a pure glorification of death in a variety of rituals that work against the body. Her systematic theology was not enough to save the world.It is that tendance against the body that always hovers in the clothing of the church and that makes me afraid for it. This was Nietzsche's critique also, that of the church's obsession with death, the dead body, though maybe he was too harsh. He threw pebbles at the great stone edifice of Christendom, murmurs and roars, traditions and postures. The church that is an Empire du Propre in and of itself. So it is a particularly difficult and complex space I feel in which women's theology very delicately finds a rose-line, and in following it she treads a precarious path refigured. I acknowledge her feat, I acknowledge her achievement, her subversion of mastery, all her submissions. And while I read her theology in order to find salvation, and its promise was hovering in every high place, I, I like those mystical women, women-feminists, poetesses, strugglers against patriarchy that strive tirelessly and gracefully for freedom beyond confession, I, I could not escape the ghost of Tiamat's corpse. Tiamat who symbolised in bodily and mythical form the complex interruption of the patriarchal by the feminine in order to save a child. By Tiamat's corpse I refer to the legendary murder of the primordial mother by the father and this mother's body that was given up to create the earth in Babylon, but this myth still holds ghastly relevance in this enlightened age, and to western society in which the cruciform institution had its more recent incarnations. I can't escape easily from the manifestations of the suppression of the feminine, when she, woman, lies uncomforted, buried alive in the foundations of Jerusalem and Rome, from which seat Peter's patriarchy has ruled for an aeon. There are grim silences with flared hips that lie there, in uneasy rest with the virtues and grails of holy tradition. Grave silences and both silent and loud violences mixed with fragile gems, those amethysts, rubies, and sapphires which signify the pure visions of the love-lands of God.In my engagement, I saw that her theology was wrapped in the arms of Augustine, Gregory and a sober hall of other gentlemen. "Hold my hand!" I said to her and as I reached for her I heard a whisper from the side. It sounded like a name. Catherine. Catherine of Sienna, the voice called. It was an unbidden dream sound, and as I tried to put her away from me I suddenly found myself face to face with her skeletal apparition. She, the exemplar of the extreme edge of the Christian institution, skin and bones, the body in decline -she came unbidden to me like a nightmare, a reincarnation of the murdered Tiamat, the in-the-flesh self-matricide, the suicidal pact that certain doctrine or dogma makes with death, the shining trope of martyrdom, martyrdom via anorexia mirabilis, all in honour of what can only be thus signified a devouring Godhead-but again seems more truly the self-mutilating housing of the patriarchal oppressor, heaving in its fear of the maternal, the feminine, with femininity's unique and irrepressible relation to life since Eve. …
Colloquium 40/1, May 1, 2008
SeaChanges: Journal of Women Scholars of Religion and Theology 6, Mar 1, 2013
Sexuality and Ideology: Queer readings from the Antipodes [Sheffield Phoenix], 2015
This essay explores a transgressive reading that is the surplus of any reading of the biblical So... more This essay explores a transgressive reading that is the surplus of any reading of the biblical Song of Songs and Hélène Cixous's The Book of Promethea that is characterised by openness to difference. The reading could be described as bisexual that leads to a break down of phallic mono-sexuality and reprioritising of the body in a redemption of human animality.
The Bible and Rape Culture. Eds. Katie Edwards, Caroline Blyth and Emily Colgan. Palgrave MacMillan, 2018
ZImri and Cozbi: I’ll be honest with you. I want to save them. I want to save them both. I want ... more ZImri and Cozbi: I’ll be honest with you. I want to save them. I want to save them both. I want to stop death from coming. I want to hold back Phinehas. I would take his poisoned spear and throw it to the side. I would tie him up and prevent him from this catastrophe, to stop him before he enters the tent. But each time I read this text death comes again.
I receive this vignette in the Hebrew bible as if I had happened on a set of photographs or splices of film. The climax of the reading is that final blood soaked spectacle. The pure narrative of the text is not encyclopaedic. It is patchy, blurry, and out-of-sync, as if pieced and rejoined as a mosaic of scenes that only loosely align. But, for all the words, the reader is left with the dramatic and horrid finale, an image; a slice from the reel of film that devastates. But, for all of this, it’s a terrible love that I bear this text. It is a love as strong as death. It is like fiery coals. It burns me up and leaves me gasping with its torment. It’s like a revolving door. I read anew, another time, and behold the couple are resurrected. In each reading they take those same fateful steps past the sanctuary to Zimri’s tent and death comes after them spear in hand every time. It is a fate that cannot be turned away from them. They are doomed the moment they enter the camp. But also, I, in rereading the text, it is as if I murder the couple continually. I don’t want to believe it but it’s true: “The loving couple is outside the law, and the law is deadly for it …” (Cixous). As reader, I participate with the law.
Creation and Hope (Eugene, Or: Pickwick, 2018), 2018
As in the extract from Rilke’s ‘Eighth Elegy’ that begins this essay, the other-than-human in the... more As in the extract from Rilke’s ‘Eighth Elegy’ that begins this essay, the other-than-human in the world is an object of curiosity, mystery and denigration. Derrida’s 1997 Cerisy lectures “L’animal que donc je suis [à suivre]” aligns itself with Rilke’s mood in its desire to be with or for rather than in spite of the animal. In his first lecture, Derrida speaks of the difference between nudity and animal non-nudity. He speaks of the beginnings of the civilized world. The beginnings of literature and of language. He reveals his shame. He speaks of cats in literature; and of poetry and passion. He speaks of sacrifice.
Derrida’s survey of the question of the animal in Genesis penetrates into the heart of animal theology. Much of the Western theological tradition has interpreted the hierarchical distinction between the animal and the human as ratified and limned with divine authority in the first pages of the Judeo-Christian sacred text. Thus in Derrida’s rewriting and re-interpretation of Genesis, he is firstly recognizing the power of these texts that are lodged at the heart of the question of the animal and then offers an ‘other’ reading that deconstructs this dominating theological narrative and the ways in which it is made manifest. Likewise, in the Western philosophical tradition the animal has been an invisible and mute companion—easily set aside—and , as Derrida will claim, the historic span of this consequential monologue about the animal has done little except to further underline the false dichotomy of the human-animal relation. In this situation Derrida offers a reading of hope: a new relation, and this means looking into the face of l’animal as a divine moment...
The Bible and Art: Perspectives from Oceania, Eds: Caroline Blyth, Nasili Vaka’uta [Bloomsbury], 2017
Derrida is naked at the beginning of Genesis in L'animal que donc je suis. In the first Cerisy l... more Derrida is naked at the beginning of Genesis in L'animal que donc je suis. In the first Cerisy lecture, 1997, he brings us to an imaginary; the time before time, at the founding of the world.
He appears naked here in order to cross a certain border. To return to that moment when a boundary had not yet been fashioned. The break or the separation, the division of waters from waters, and flesh from flesh. As Derrida writes, he goes there 'to surrender to the animal'. He goes to the time of the animal, when the animal was also the man, a living creature: nepeš ḥayah.
Women's Studies Journal, 2021
An exploration of the film/novel "Disobedience" (Naomi Alderman) with reference to a biblical and... more An exploration of the film/novel "Disobedience" (Naomi Alderman) with reference to a biblical and Jewish lesbian history; discusses the violence of sacred texts towards the lesbian community.
Stimulus: The New Zealand Journal of Christian Thought and Practice, Jul 1, 2013
For the last four weeks the final year education class at Laidlaw College has been studying human... more For the last four weeks the final year education class at Laidlaw College has been studying human development. They have not only been thinking of biological or cognitive development, but there has been a special emphasis on the rich questions of human development forming around notions of humanness and human being. They have been asking questions like 'what does it mean to reach one's potential?' And 'what does it mean to flourish?'
Hecate, 2014
The life of a tallith; which is not mine, the tallith of death. I am condemned to weave it only, ... more The life of a tallith; which is not mine, the tallith of death. I am condemned to weave it only, to touch my hands upon the threads, but once the weaving is done, I have lost it. It becomes his. Wait, I must finish it, and then secretly unravel it.
Showing Theory Press eBooks, Feb 28, 2022
Stimulus: The New Zealand Journal of Christian Thought and Practice, Jul 1, 2012
... Stimulus: The New Zealand Journal of Christian Thought and Practice. Volume 19 Issue 2 (Jul 2... more ... Stimulus: The New Zealand Journal of Christian Thought and Practice. Volume 19 Issue 2 (Jul 2012). Educated guesses: Sacred journeys and transformational learning. Klangwisan, Yael 1. Abstract: Genesis 12 begins the famous reading called in Hebrew, Lek-l'ka (Go forth!). ...
The murder of Cozbi is a clear incidence of gendered, sexualized violence, recounted in the Hebre... more The murder of Cozbi is a clear incidence of gendered, sexualized violence, recounted in the Hebrew biblical book of Numbers. Drawing inspiration from Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida and Helene Cixous’ Angst, Yael Klangwisan takes an unflinching look at the bloody spectacle of Numbers 23. Employing Barthes’s photographic categories of studium (the wider scene or spectacle) and punctum (an element that punctures the scene), she teases out this biblical tradition relating the murders of Zimri and Cozbi by Hebrew priest Phinehas, recounting the litany of horrors in such a way that the reader is refused the distance and the sang-froid offered by the narrator. Comparing the biblical tradition with other classical love tragedies, Klangwisan then considers this literary trope in depth, moving towards her own, alternative ending for Cozbi’s story, where, in the spirit of Cixous’ rereading of the Tristan and Isolde legend, “love and life are victorious.”
Stimulus: The New Zealand Journal of Christian Thought and Practice, Apr 1, 2014
Review(s) of: The following reflection on animal suffering and the problem of evil was presented ... more Review(s) of: The following reflection on animal suffering and the problem of evil was presented at the book launch held, by Laidlaw College in August 2013. Stimulus is pleased to publish it as a further response to this significant book.
Stimulus: The New Zealand Journal of Christian Thought and Practice, Jun 1, 2019
Stimulus: The New Zealand Journal of Christian Thought and Practice, 2015
Lisa: So I've been thinking about transformation and formation and the places where we notice... more Lisa: So I've been thinking about transformation and formation and the places where we notice these processes taking place, particularly in counselling.
Hecate, 2016
I dream-read a book. It was a book about the Christian God, written by a woman. That in itself is... more I dream-read a book. It was a book about the Christian God, written by a woman. That in itself is a mystical amazement: a delightful aberration. A theology that has breasts, a womb, an-Other libidinal economy. As I have already written, I was dream-reading this book. I say "dream-reading" because while I read, cerebrally, in good faith, in the deeps of my body and my mind, such writing always calls to the subterranean and the beyond. And there I was reading at the border listening to the echoes from the other shore. This woman who wrote about God had never been only invested in the cerebral. Her text's journey intersected deity with viscera. And for me, that gut-deep writing is always already about the body, its avowal and its disavowal. To be sure, I did dream vividly during the time I read, while I read, waking dreams, and dreams of the night, nightmares. This is the richness of the woman's theological work, and the way it calls to blood and tissue. I had dreams of encounters, dreams of raptures, dreams of the dark and far face of God, but also I was plagued by nightmares of rapes and endless violations. I was dream-reading through the ages of Christendom, I think, mediated and framed by her theological eyes. But in the most restless of my deeps, I found no place to sit down, I kept running like Solomon's Shulamite, kept looking for gardens, fountains, for life in what so often appeared to me as a pure glorification of death in a variety of rituals that work against the body. Her systematic theology was not enough to save the world.It is that tendance against the body that always hovers in the clothing of the church and that makes me afraid for it. This was Nietzsche's critique also, that of the church's obsession with death, the dead body, though maybe he was too harsh. He threw pebbles at the great stone edifice of Christendom, murmurs and roars, traditions and postures. The church that is an Empire du Propre in and of itself. So it is a particularly difficult and complex space I feel in which women's theology very delicately finds a rose-line, and in following it she treads a precarious path refigured. I acknowledge her feat, I acknowledge her achievement, her subversion of mastery, all her submissions. And while I read her theology in order to find salvation, and its promise was hovering in every high place, I, I like those mystical women, women-feminists, poetesses, strugglers against patriarchy that strive tirelessly and gracefully for freedom beyond confession, I, I could not escape the ghost of Tiamat's corpse. Tiamat who symbolised in bodily and mythical form the complex interruption of the patriarchal by the feminine in order to save a child. By Tiamat's corpse I refer to the legendary murder of the primordial mother by the father and this mother's body that was given up to create the earth in Babylon, but this myth still holds ghastly relevance in this enlightened age, and to western society in which the cruciform institution had its more recent incarnations. I can't escape easily from the manifestations of the suppression of the feminine, when she, woman, lies uncomforted, buried alive in the foundations of Jerusalem and Rome, from which seat Peter's patriarchy has ruled for an aeon. There are grim silences with flared hips that lie there, in uneasy rest with the virtues and grails of holy tradition. Grave silences and both silent and loud violences mixed with fragile gems, those amethysts, rubies, and sapphires which signify the pure visions of the love-lands of God.In my engagement, I saw that her theology was wrapped in the arms of Augustine, Gregory and a sober hall of other gentlemen. "Hold my hand!" I said to her and as I reached for her I heard a whisper from the side. It sounded like a name. Catherine. Catherine of Sienna, the voice called. It was an unbidden dream sound, and as I tried to put her away from me I suddenly found myself face to face with her skeletal apparition. She, the exemplar of the extreme edge of the Christian institution, skin and bones, the body in decline -she came unbidden to me like a nightmare, a reincarnation of the murdered Tiamat, the in-the-flesh self-matricide, the suicidal pact that certain doctrine or dogma makes with death, the shining trope of martyrdom, martyrdom via anorexia mirabilis, all in honour of what can only be thus signified a devouring Godhead-but again seems more truly the self-mutilating housing of the patriarchal oppressor, heaving in its fear of the maternal, the feminine, with femininity's unique and irrepressible relation to life since Eve. …
Colloquium 40/1, May 1, 2008
SeaChanges: Journal of Women Scholars of Religion and Theology 6, Mar 1, 2013
This biblical quote in French, along with the beautiful hues of the Algerian alpine landscape of ... more This biblical quote in French, along with the beautiful hues of the Algerian alpine landscape of the Atlas Mountains, introduces the film, Des hommes et des dieux, (Of Gods and Men, 2010), directed by Xavier Beauvois, and received with critical acclaim. Beauvois, with tremendous sensitivity, recreates the story of the seven French Trappist Monks of the remote and poor region of Tibhirine, who would eventually be caught up in the Algerian Civil War and lose their lives to it. Though the film will end, sadly, in captivity, it is filled with escapes in the shape of falls into grace, and lit with the simple and life-affirming graces of sunlight, the elements, meals shared, music, prayer and the unconquerable graces of friendship, hospitality and love. The journey, as represented by Beauvois, becomes more poignant than its end in the snow covered climes of Atlas's slopes.
Relegere: Studies in Religion and Reception, 2017
The Bible and Critical Theory, 2016
The relationship between the film Mad Max Fury Road and the biblical text of the Exodus is explor... more The relationship between the film Mad Max Fury Road and the biblical text of the Exodus is explored via Hegel’s first man of history and Helene Cixous’s polemic against the Hegelian model “Le sexe ou la tete”.
This is a remarkable book that sets out to deconstruct academic writing on the Song of Songs. It ... more This is a remarkable book that sets out to deconstruct academic writing on the Song of Songs. It emerges at that place where biblical scholarship on the Song of Songs is subverted by French literary theory, where biblical literature escapes biblical hermeneutics, and where the ancient poetry of the Song of Songs comes face to face with the modern poetry of Hélène Cixous. The question asked is whether a poetic text like the Song of Songs can be systematized, interpreted and worked out. For as much as Jouissance is a work on the Song of Songs, it is also a work about reading poetically, challenging the notion that the Song of Songs can be read at all.
In response the reader-author presents an-‘other’ kind of reading. She inhabits the text of the Song of Songs, bringing herself to it; allowing herself to be taken in its jaws, one time, and once only, and then giving it away and refusing possession. If this could be called reading, it would be live-reading: a reading of the Song of Songs that is birthed and dreamed, that joins breath with breath. This is a reading that is allowed to live.
The reader is invited via the midwifery of Hélène Cixous’s poetic texts to encounter the enigmatic poetry of the Song of Songs, its creative and transformative polysemy, engendering a ‘third body’, third text, that is reflective and multivalent, inscripted with elements that are continuous and discontinuous, as well as dynamic, mythic and subversive. Read in the spirit of Cixousian literary theory, Jouissance is a visceral-corporeal experience of the transgressive and creative act of the Song of Songs that merges the limits of language with the bliss and suffering of the beyond.
"Le soleil ni la mort ne peuvent se regarder en face" [You cannot stare straight into the sun, or... more "Le soleil ni la mort ne peuvent se regarder en face" [You cannot stare straight into the sun, or death], Francois de La Rochefoucauld, Maxim 26.
I have made one long pilgrimage of mourning, for a man I never met. I went all the way to the Cimetière de Ris-Orangis to visit his grave, a small, rounded, river stone from the West Coast in my hand. A gruff old gardener in blue overalls pointed the way. There it was. The dark granite that marked his resting place. On the granite marker: "Jackie", of all things. Of course, he wasn't there, not really, and so I placed there the round stone to mark his absence, a stone not a flower, because of its weight. I sat on the ground, as is my people's tradition, whispered the mourner's kaddish … like a fool because of what use are words? They won't raise him from the dead. Silence is a better offering … but that is already impossible too … holding one's breath: as this man once wrote for his friend Michel Foucauld, "[we sit] in the absolute silence where we remain nonetheless turned toward him" ...
... And it is thus I read this scroll as if I come face to face with black black roach, the bibli... more ... And it is thus I read this scroll as if I come face to face with black black roach, the biblical text, Leviticus, and I confess that I may have caught this text in a wardrobe door. I want to read as if it was a silent meeting between myself and this roach in the first garden. I want to try to be its silence. There, in that silence, a beautiful shadow bible exists I pray, if I but follow this other-reading. When I am not too busy raging at it, … and my very life's work hinges upon finding an escape route through its borders, checkpoints, and no-man's-lands. The dire text. The unjust text. The brutal text. The cruel text. An easy rage but in the silence perhaps there could be a return, to recover again the things of its lost childhood, to find the manna scattered through the text. In the same breath that this text forbids the root, it also offers it, a way to return, perhaps in exile, perhaps in shadow, but behind the forbidding lines, I believe there are escape routes. Thus, in Cixous's Talmud she renounces it: "the purpose of Those Bible is to forbid the root", but then she also forgives it, that she finds in other hidden scrolls "the most beautiful things in the world", "infinite" and "work of all works". There are Song of Songs and there are Books of Job, manna, honey and milk, it all overflows. Leviticus, the roach in the door, half squashed. I have determined to look it in the eye ...
This paper explores Helene Cixous’ response to the theory of ‘Gift’ and then presents a ‘live’-re... more This paper explores Helene Cixous’ response to the theory of ‘Gift’ and then presents a ‘live’-reading of the Song of Songs in terms of Gift. This is an approach to the Song of Songs which could be seen as a kind of birthing that allows multiple escapes the Realm of the Proper. The goal that will both succeed and fail is to enter Cixous’ feminine realm of ‘pure’ Gift with the text through form and language of the paper. Rather than being confined to cycles of exchange and return, of absolutes, of economies, the Song of Songs will be shown to continually overflow boundaries and break laws. The new and unique are birthed all the time inside the text, rupturing language into unlimited possibility and endless creativity. Love escapes. Bringing together Cixous’ own live-texts and the author’s creative response to the Shulamith, the scene is set for a vibrant reading.
doctoral thesis: Auckland University of Technology, Aug 2012
In the milieu of exegetical readings, Jouissance asks “can she be read?” Jouissance asks whether ... more In the milieu of exegetical readings, Jouissance asks “can she be read?” Jouissance asks whether it is possible that a poetic text characterized by star falls and shadows can be systematised; an object of exegesis. An-‘other’ kind of reading is proposed; a kind of reading that resists the exegetical economy as absolute by disclosing an open system. It would be a kind of textual encounter. It would orient itself as one of unlimited possible readings but it would be naked, unique and ‘true’. In the reading, the reader-author would inhabit the text, bringing her ‘whole being’ to it; allowing herself to be taken in its jaws, one time, and once only. If this could be called reading, it would be live-reading, or reciprocating-reading or corporeal reading. It is a reading of the Song of Songs that is birthed and dreamed; that joins breath with breath.
Bible and critical theory
This is another of Roland Boer's nomadic offerings. This book, he tells us, he completed partly w... more This is another of Roland Boer's nomadic offerings. This book, he tells us, he completed partly while on a container ship carving through the Panama Canal, and then the rest of it on the Trans-Mongolian railway. I can almost hear the rhythmic clatter in chapter 7, and see the eerie reflection of Ernst Bloch in the carriage window. I might also add that Siberia is a far cry from where I am completing this review, in a decrepit caravan in the Waitakere Ranges of West Auckland, with my loud speakers belting out Cave (if geographical context has anything to do with it; Boer seems to indicate it does [pp. viii-ix]). Nick Cave himself is also child of the world, having lived in Germany, Brazil, and London (p. 75) and this international exposure must have had a strong impact on his sound and conditioned the life experience that he transfers into his lyrics, poetry and novels. Yet, Cave's music and other creative works seem to inhabit a 'Ned Kelly' imaginary, rooted in an Antipodean cultural and geographical memory that might be symbolized by a run-down shack on the outskirts of outback Warracknabeal. This is the shack that Boer also recalls as "that house on the edge of town" (pp. 19-21). I also recall that house.
Colloquium 44/1, May 2012
Colloquium 42/2, Nov 2010
This is the second of William Loader s series on Sexuality in Judaism and Christianity in the Hel... more This is the second of William Loader s series on Sexuality in Judaism and Christianity in the Hellenistic Greco-Roman era. As with his first volume, Enoch, Levi and the Jubilees on Sexuality, Attitudes Towards Sexuality in the Early Enoch Literature, the Aramaic Levi Document, and the Book of Jubilees (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), Loader demonstrates a rigorous exploration of themes concerning sexuality in the sectarian literature uncovered at Qumran. Loaders definition of sexuality is broad and so within the sectarian literature Loader explores marriage and divorce, types of sexual wrongdoing, regulations around legalised sexuality, reproductive purity, management of genital, reproductive or sexually transmitted diseases, and more broadly a range of themes surrounding the sectarians' "management of the sexuality of women." Loader explores the Temple Scroll, 4QMMT, the Damascus Document (D), and groups other texts into categories such as the Legal Texts, the Liturgical Material, the Biblical Exposition material and the Wisdom Texts. Loader confirms that there is concern with the quality of text available (2-4) and has organized a clear system of working with the text using a compilation of standard textual reconstructions and translations (see 2-4). However, as Loader points out (2-3), the reliability of certain texts and documents due to damage or loss and consequent reconstruction produces a "difficulty" (3) which compounds the speculative quality of the investigation. Furthermore there are also questions about the degree to which the extant literature itself is truly representative of all the communities of Qumran. The Temple Scroll, Damascus Document and 4QMMT are almost complete texts and Loader draws his conclusions regarding sexuality with a degree of confidence, but documents such as 4Qpap Ritual of Marriage (257) and many others are literally in pieces and any conclusions drawn are tentative. Regardless of Loaders recognition of the limits of the study (3), some of his conclusions concerning sexuality in Qumran are surprisingly insistent. 254 Colloquium 42/2 2010
Colloquium 41/1, May 2009
Colloquium 40/1, May 2008
