Poetics of the Flesh - Softcover

Rivera, Mayra

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822360136 ISBN 13: 9780822360131

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

In Poetics of the Flesh Mayra Rivera offers poetic reflections on how we understand our carnal relationship to the world, at once spiritual, organic, and social. She connects conversations about corporeality in theology, political theory, and continental philosophy to show the relationship between the ways ancient Christian thinkers and modern Western philosophers conceive of the "body" and "flesh." Her readings of the biblical writings of John and Paul as well as the work of Tertullian illustrate how Christian ideas of flesh influenced the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Michel Foucault, and inform her readings of Judith Butler, Frantz Fanon, and others. Rivera also furthers developments in new materialism by exploring the intersections among bodies, material elements, social arrangements, and discourses through body and flesh. By painting a complex picture of bodies, and by developing an account of how the social materializes in flesh, Rivera provides a new way to understand gender and race.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mayra Rivera is Associate Professor of Theology and Latina/o Studies at Harvard University and the author of The Touch of Transcendence: A Postcolonial Theology of God.

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Poetics of the Flesh

By Mayra Rivera

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2015 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-6013-1

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
INTRODUCTION Both Flesh and Not, 
PART I: Regarding Christian Bodies, 
CHAPTER 1 Becoming Flesh: The Gospel of John, 
CHAPTER 2 Abandoning Flesh: The Letters of Paul, 
CHAPTER 3 Embracing Flesh: Tertullian, 
PART II: The Philosophers' (Christian) Flesh, 
CHAPTER 4 Incarnate Philosophy, 
CHAPTER 5 The Ends of Flesh, 
PART III: A Labyrinth of Incarnations, 
CHAPTER 6 Inescapable Bodies, 
CHAPTER 7 Carnal Relations, 
CONCLUSION, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

BECOMING FLESH

The Gospel of John

"The word became flesh" might well be the most remembered phrase of the gospels. "Word" gives "became flesh" a strange appeal. It joins the tangible and the intangible. It renders the real world evident and invisible. "It was thing and spirit both: the real/ world: evident, invisible," writes poet Marie Howe.

"Word became flesh" — or "verb became flesh," as I first learned it — continues to attract those attempting to think about corporeality in cultures influenced by Christianity. Poets and writers keep returning to this statement, even if doubtfully intrigued. "A word made flesh is seldom," Emily Dickinson observes. The statement also repels those who seek to liberate their intellectual traditions from the legacy of Christian thought. They are anxious that the word would imprison the flesh, making it a mere instrument of the Christian God. The phrase represents light for some and the "darkness of religion" for others — but its influence cannot be neglected.

I remain intrigued by the peculiar vitality of flesh in this ancient text — even when the subtle movements of this flesh are often swept away by gusts of metaphysical pronouncements. I note the places where those gusts directly impact the verses I read. But I do not follow their path. Instead I keep my eyes on the intricate qualities of flesh. And I assume flesh refers to all human flesh — and more. Some might object that the gospel does not authorize such a reading, that its visions are only for its own community, delimited by its reviled others — those who do not believe, do not understand, who are Jews. True. But I read with those who have read it as if it were speaking about all flesh, including their own, who have been moved and shaped by its poetics. I keep my eyes on the characterizations of flesh that disrupt, even if tentatively, the gospel's most restrictive impulses — and their ex-carnations.

Beginnings

The gospel's prologue draws from older biblical traditions, framing its account of the life of Jesus as an event of cosmic significance. It starts by turning back to the very beginning, to the point when the divine word creates — reminding readers of the creative word of God in the first chapter of the book of Genesis.

In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the word was God. ... All things came into being through the word. ... What has come into being in the word was life, and the life was the light of all people. ... The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it. ... And the word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen its glory.

Word, life, light, flesh, and glory ... Rather than a description of distinct species remembered from Genesis 1 — plants, birds, sea monsters — what is created is life itself. This life is also light — the first element called forth by God's word in Genesis 1. John's depiction of the light shining in darkness, neither overcome nor comprehended by darkness, evokes a statement in Genesis; namely that God "separated the light from the darkness." And the link between life and light would have been familiar to readers of the Wisdom of Solomon, where Wisdom (Sophia), the creative principle of God, is also depicted as God's radiance. But in the Gospel of John, these allusions to the creative word of God are followed by the announcement that the word became flesh. And immediately, one presumes simultaneously, the word is taking place among people and its radiance manifest as glory (doxa). Life, light, and glory appear as the word becomes flesh. Only in flesh. "Without ears to hear it, the Word remains unheard," Karmen MacKendrick observes, "and it seems that light too must become flesh as the very condition of its recognizability, its visibility, its shining." Thus in the flesh, the creative word becomes not only audible, but also visible and touchable.

Taken by itself, cut off from the creation stories that inspired it and from the images and events that follow, "word became flesh" could be construed as a simple progression: from a first principle, word, to the flesh. Or it could be read as describing the trajectory of word as a vector that touches flesh at one point, as a tangent touches a circle, to use Karl Barth's image. Perhaps readers are supposed to draw that line, as many have. But the verses just cited describe complex relationships between multiple elements — not just word and flesh — forming an intricate pattern of images that is hardly reducible to a single line. Word, life, light, flesh, and glory converge into and swerve from one another. As the narrative progresses, the gospel adds other elements to its poetic streams — water, bread, and blood. All of these elements circulate through the gospel narrative, moving, being exchanged, and transformed.

Attending to these patterns of relationship between the multiple elements in the gospel opens possibilities for richer interpretations of its flesh. Yet it is also easy to lose sight of flesh. I have found it necessary to mark the gospel's explicit references to flesh, as stepping-stones from which to observe its movements and transformations.

Elemental Flesh

The discussion of the prologue already reveals the significance of flesh for the overarching argument of the gospel and by extension for Christian understandings of the body. In this most celebrated statement of the incarnation, there is no body (soma), only flesh (sarx). Indeed, the gospel uses the term "body" only in relation to the death of Jesus — its announcement and the descriptions of the actual event. While in this gospel body might be simply a corpse, flesh is unstable and complex. Flesh is what the word became (egeneto), but also what is born of the flesh: "What is born [gegennemenon] of the flesh is flesh and what is born of the spirit is spirit." A fixed boundary? Apparently not, or not so in any simple way, because those born of flesh are being called to be born of spirit. Thus not only does the word become flesh, but what became flesh will become spirit. The word is transformed as flesh and in the process flesh itself changes.

This is a well-known account of salvation as theosis (or theopoiesis). We remember it in Athanasius's terms, "God became man so that man can become God." Contemporary commentators of the Gospel of John often glance over "flesh" and read "man." Yet the distinct terms of the gospel's flesh evoke more elemental dimensions of life. The word became flesh so that flesh could become spirit — and bread.

Flesh — or his flesh — is also bread. Before establishing the link between bread and flesh, the gospel draws...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822360136
• ISBN 13: 9780822360131
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 216
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande