LEVITICUS, DECONSTRUCTION AND THE BODY

by

Francis Landy,

University of Alberta

1. Introduction

1.1.	Let us call deconstruction the practice of resistance to totalizing discourses, to the desire for coherence and sense, the attribution of words to a master program that unbinds, disaffiliates, as it juggles and congeals, and let us call feminism the practice of resistance to totalizing hierarchies, an attention to the disenfranchised other, the libidinal voice, face that calls the text to an encounter ever dissimulated, and the body, that discordant, wretched body, body of the text, of the rose…gurgles and whistles in the night, to the sound of dreams.

1.2. And the Bible, we mustn't forget the hoary Bible, whose sexual proclivities are surely its business, was there ever a time when its locks hung heavy with dew, outside the door of the Beloved? Yet it has its lovers, greedy for its flesh, or its penis. Oh the pathos of old men, the aged hierarchs, in the garden of Susanna.

2. Leviticus as Pornography

2.1. Last term I had the privilege of teaching a course on Leviticus, one of those courses in which I knew much less than my students. Leviticus, a constructed text if ever there was one, an imagination, imaginaire, of an ideal changeless social and sacred order, about the maintenance of the clean and proper body of man and woman, Israel and God, and a text about the transactions and processes of the body. One student wrote about Leviticus as pornography, in comparison with Ezekiel. For him, the chapters on sexual transgression homologised women with the forbidden world of idolatry (an argument rather similar to Robert Carroll's); he was interested by the absence of Ezekiel's excremental fantasy in Leviticus, except in the pornoprophetic chapter 26, and its replacement by imagery of annihilation. I did not agree with the simple reduction of women to idolatry; the chapters spend too much of their time imagining illicit sexual behaviour (and, of course, attributing it to the demonised other, Egypt and Canaan). Imagining deviance represents desire, a desire projected outward and proscribed, but assumed to be ever-present and insidious. Look at the piling up of terms of reprobation: hmz, hb(wt, lbt, dsx, hdn. Why all the excitement? And what is its obverse? Is it jouissance, as Kristeva suggests in her discussion of abjection? It may be terror at the loss of boundaries, interfamilial, inter-species, across genders, the loss of self. The self, like the life force, the #$pn, is always leaking. The attraction and peril of the other side can be felt most insistently when the text switches subject position. For instance, in 20.18, it tells us, tautologously, that "she (the menstruant) has uncovered the source of her blood" (hymd rwqm t) htlg )yhw). Why evoke the subjectivity of the woman? Or her agency? Is it for the sake of the striptease, identification with the object of the gaze as a means of annulling the gaze? What is exposed, however, is not her body but her blood, turning her inside out. The gaze perhaps recoils at the sight, or revels in it - they both seem to be scrabbling to take off her clothes, and the man does lie with her. Is it a desire for the blood, the impure female blood, that escapes from its enclosure, and threatens to overwhelm, to engulf the penis? There is the curious juxtaposition of the purificatory, life-giving metaphor of "source", rwqm, and blood, the contaminating waste product of reproduction. Richard Whitekettle persuasively argues that the womb in Leviticus corresponds to the waters of chaos in Genesis 1.2, which have to be contained for creation to unfold. The feminine principle then seems antonymic to God. This, as we shall see, is too simple. The man at any rate seems to be in touch with, to feast upon her essence, the source of her blood; sperm and uterine blood are an explosive mixture. But he does so through her eyes, imagining his, stripping for his delectation, being turned on by his pleasure. Pleasure feasts on pleasure. Is this a masculine fantasy? Indeed. His own nakedness, self-exposure, is so carefully occluded. The male is left intact, immune from exposure. But it may respond to, recognize, her own experience; at the very least it posits it, as a counterpoise to the dominant rhetoric of the book. We can imagine her exhibitionist pleasure, and his voyeurist delight, infused with that of the book, which seeks to render its fascination, its nakedness, invisible. The erasure to which they are both consigned ("they shall be cut off from their people") maintains the couple's (or text's) jouissance outside history and society, in a perhaps secretly indulged forbidden archive.

2.2. The insistent imagery, "uncovering nakedness" (hwr( hlg), "kinship flesh" (r)#$) etc. suggests a desire to perceive , along with the desire for intercourse, and a primal identification - the unity of kinship becoming the union of flesh. What is concealed? Perhaps our bare humanity/animality. The woman who draws near (brqt) to the beast, the opposite of the sacrificial exploitation of animals, through bringing them near (brq) to the altar. Uncovering nakedness recalls the innocent nakedness of Genesis 2, and the quasi-incest of the first couple. Eden then is identified with Canaan and Egypt, the lands said to engage in forbidden practices (Lev.18.2, 27, 20.23-24). The ideal world of Leviticus then supercedes and represses the primordial one - hence its insecurity. We are close to the "feminist discourse on embodiment" as well as the polymorphous sexual imagination of the Song of Songs.

3. Leviticus and Land

3.1. Another essay, very polished, dealt with the land, the female complement or partner of God, in which he is immanent. The land is the object of care throughout the book, and the image, the foundation, of its coherence: Israel's dwelling in the land is the condition for God's indwelling and for the social and literary structure that makes it possible. It is an ideal vision of the future. Except that the future is already foreclosed. Even before arrival, we imagine exile. The book is reft with intimations of failure. From the death of Nadab and Abihu to the threat or prediction that the land will vomit you out to the culminating apocalypse, there is no doubt that the world of Leviticus will not happen. It is thus a self-negating book, one which posits a world that will never happen. Remarkably, unlike Deuteronomy, it leaves us outside the land. There is no return. God remembers his covenant with the ancestors, the term "covenant" recalling the "eternal covenant of salt" (Mlw( xlm tyrb) at the beginning (2.14). And what does this mean? God hugging the ancestral ghostly phallus, that symbol of patrilineage, in its absence, and remembering the land. There is the arousal, especially given the homonymity of "remember" and "male," and the anticipation that God will insert the spectral penis into the land, but for the moment it is waste, and this waste is apparently its Sabbath, its homeostasis, the Sabbath that is the equivalent of the now desolate holy place.

3.2. The word for memory, rkz, occurs also as the "memorial portion," htrkza, that together with the entire complement of incense, is offered up with the meal-offering in chapter 2. God is aroused by the fragrance (xwxn xyr) of incense and wheat. Intertextually, the incense reminds one of the Song of Songs, and the "heap of wheat, hedged with lilies," to which the woman's belly is compared there (7.3). What is remembered, and what is its relationship with masculinity, the logos that speaks throughout the book and whose world, and land, it projects/protects? The sensuality of the book is overtly alimentary, the sacrifices are the "food" of God (Lev.22.8 etc.), but what about the other senses, and organs?

4. The Blasphemer

4.1. Another student wrote about the narratives that disturb the serenity of Leviticus, namely chapters 10 (the deaths of Nadab and Abihu) and 24 (the blasphemer). I will look at the second of these. Narrative, presupposing contingency and crisis, subverts the program of Leviticus, according to which nothing ever changes. The narrative of chapter 24, so brief, so enigmatic, apparently superogatory, challenges the entire social and literary structure of the book. Two men fight: fighting encapsulates the violence that may or will destroy society. Two men fighting is a motif, an emblematic scene, throughout the Pentateuch. One of them is the son of an Egyptian man and an Israelite woman; he is a typical representative of the br br(, the punningly designated "mixed multitude" that went up with Israel (Exod.12.38), and hence of the hybridity Leviticus resolutely condemns. He gives the lie to the pure and proper body of Israel. During the fight the man curses the "name"; as the student who wrote on pornography pointed out, the word for "curse," bqn, is the root of hbqn, "female," and suggests an invagination, a hollowing out, of the name of God. Desecration of the name and its derivatives, such as the priestly patrilineage in 22.9, is the most heinous of offences, the root offence, in Leviticus, and its ramifications could lead us a merry dance. If the whole book is the working out of the name, the language, of God, as suggested for instance by the metaphoric formula 'h yn), "I am YHWH," then the curser threatens the entire sacred and phallic order.

4.2. Nothing restores it, though God carries on as if nothing had happened. Two solutions are attempted. One is rhetorical. God is consulted, and after decreeing execution, proceeds to an apparently irrelevant trotting out of the talionic formula. Here a fantasy of dismemberment is overlaid by assertion of reciprocity. The second is the narrative account of the fate of the recreant, who is taken outside the camp and stoned, after the witnesses have laid their hands on him. The ceremonial obviously corresponds to the expulsion of the scapegoat in Leviticus 16 and to the disposal of the ashes of the sin- offerings outside the camp. It is also an inversion of the sacrificial ritual, in which the donor or confessor places his hand on the animal before the divine altar. The victim is removed from the camp, the microcosm of social order, and the sacred fire at its centre; there he is crushed, bruised, smashed, rendered unrecognisable as human, by the stones which configure the earth, and, in this case, the desert.

4.3. Here we come to the essential ambiguity, also pointed out by this student. For God is the God of the desert as well as the God of the camp, domesticated at the heart of society. He is in the subject position of Azazel, as well as its antithesis. This is shown, for instance, by the series of dizzying puns on the word for "goat," ry(#: Edom, whirlwind, terror, hair, all of which are more or less associated with the theophany. God is both outside as well as inside the camp, identified with chaos as well as creation. The desert symbolises non-life in the Pentateuch. The book inserts itself between and holds apart the two aspects of God, preventing their destructive conjunction. But it also anticipates the transformation of the land into the desert, its anti-Sabbath.

5. Concluding Reflections

5.1. I have engaged with these three students' interpretations, responsively, reworking them through my own reflections, so as to emphasise the polysemic, dialogic nature of all interpretation, deconstructive interpretation among others. All three fit or involve both deconstructive and feminist discourses, inevitably. Because the one cannot go without the other. I distrust any insinuation that there is such a thing as "pure" deconstruction or "pure" feminism, a clean and proper ideological paradise. Deconstructing Leviticus means in part recovering the woman's voice in it, and whatever else it stands for. Paying attention to the marginalization, projection, and abjection of women in the text is part of the resistance to its controlling discourse, his master's voice. Deconstruction and feminism do not overlap entirely, however. Feminism, to begin with, has a particular political profile, which deconstruction might well treat as being outside its purview. The text, moreover, has complex allegiances. The world it imagines corresponds partially to the feminist program in its resistance to political hierarchies. It is a world without a king, without politics, controlling elites, or long term accumulations of capital (if one excludes the anomalous cities). According to Milgrom, it is a world without slavery, at least for Israelites. Yet this is part of its coherence, its sense.

5.2. Finally, what about embodiment? Leviticus lives in the minds and behaviours perhaps of its interpreters, in the voices of its performers, and it is a ghost of a book, whose true incarnation would have been in the bodies of sacrificial animals, the satisfaction of the gleaners, the life and guts of the society that would live by it. More than any other book of the Bible, perhaps, it is a discourse of the body. Yet perhaps, more than any other book, it conforms to the stereotype of male = spirit, logos, and female = body, which needs to be controlled. Nancy Jay postulates that sacrificial cults are patrilineal cults, which perpetuate thereby the myth of pure sacred male descent. Leviticus is an almost perfect example of this. It is one, however, that is always breaking down. It is at this point that I no longer know where to go.