All posts by Gildas Hamel

Valentinus

Sanctus Valentinus, Valentine Day, and love today

Romae, via Flaminia, natalis sancti Valentini, presbyteri et martyris, qui, post multa sanitatum et doctrinae insignia, fustibus caesus et decollatus est, sub Claudio Caesare.

Interamnae sancti Valentini, episcopi et martyris, qui, post diutinam caedem mancipatus custodiae, et, cum superari non posset, tandem, mediae noctis silentio eiectus de carcere, decollatus est, iussu praefecti urbis Placidi. (Martyrologium Ecclesiae)

February the 13th corresponds to the Ides of February. The 14th of February, corresponds to the first day of the Kalends of March in the Julian calendar. Plum trees are in bloom, almond trees have already blossomed. Spring is in the air, at least for coastal Californians and for the ancient Romans who lived at around 30–40 degrees of latitude (Santa Cruz: 39º N; Rome: 41º N).

In ancient Rome, the goddess Juno, who was seen as the queen of the pantheon in the late Republic, was honored on February 14th.  Juno was also revered as the goddess of women and marriage. Juno Lucina was the goddess of childbirth. 

The following day, on February 15th, Romans celebrated the Lupercalia, a festival animated by a sort of brotherhood (a sodalitas) of young men called luperci, i.e. the “wolf-guys,” (from lupus= wolf). Sacrifices were made in the Lupercal, the cave in Rome reputed to have sheltered the she-wolf who brought up Romulus and Remus. For the rest of the ritual, I quote from The Oxford Classical Dictionary (3d ed., 1996, article “Lupercalia” p. 892):

the blood was smeared with a knife on the foreheads of two youths (who were obliged to laugh), and wiped with wool dipped in milk; then the Luperci, naked except for girdles from the skin of sacrificial goats, ran (probably) round the Palatine [….] striking bystanders, especially women, with goat-skin thongs (a favourite scene in the iconography of roman months [….].

Perhaps this striking, or marking, of women was not left to chance but was the product of deliberation under the guise of mayhem, and was expected to lead to marriages.

What does Valentine have to do with the Lupercalia? Under Claudius II, around the year A.D. 270, Valentine was a priest in Rome.  He was eventually arrested (for marrying young people?) before the Prefect of Rome, Placidus, who condemned him to be beaten to death with clubs and to have his head cut off (see Latin above).  He suffered martyrdom on the 14th day of February, about the year 270.  If the date of his death is correct, it might be the date alone that attracted to the name of Valentinus stories about his marrying young people in Rome…. The pull of the Lupercalia festival would have been strong enough to make Christianized Romans draw new meanings from the ancient Roman feast and attach them to Valentinus who died on that same day. Or did it happen the other way around, that is, Valentine was associated with marriage, and the date of his death was conveniently attached to that of the Lupercalia festival?

Eventually, the Christian church went further and tried to completely transform this early Spring festival . Gelasius, bishop of Rome at the end of the 5th c., is thought to have “banned Christian participation [in the Lupercalia] and transformed it into the feast of the Purification of the Virgin.” (see Oxford Classical Dictionary, quoted above). Again, a very ancient aspect of the Lupercalia has here been adapted, namely the lustrations (purifications) of this fertility ritual. The Saint Valentine cult appears therefore to have come into full bloom in the 5th c. as an early Christian counter-reform, an adaptation of an ancient fertility and pre-marital ritual.

One might look at the modernized version of the St Valentine as a third stage of development. Love, its random possibilities, and the sacred aspects of social contracts and fertility, are submitting to great pressures coming from agressive forms of relentless commercialization. Yet, the wild, “wolf-like” behavior of the Lupercalia somehow survives….

Sinite mortuos….

About the notion of revelation and its accommodation to human intelligence and opinions, Spinoza writes to Oldenburg:

At dices, Apostolos omnes omninò credidisse, quòd Christus à morte resurrexit, et ad coelum reverâ ascenderit : quod ego non nego. Nam ipse etiam Abrahamus credidit, quòd Deus apud ipsum pransus fuerit, et omnes Israëlitae, quòd Deus è coelo igne circumdatus ad montem Sinaï descenderit, et cum iis immediatè locutus fuerit, cum tamen haec, et plura alia hujusmodi apparitiones, seu revelationes fuerint, captui, et opinionibus eorum hominum accommodatae, quibus Deus mentem suam iisdem revelare voluit. Concludo itaque Christi à mortuis resurrectionem reverâ spiritualem, et solis fidelibus ad eorum captum revelatam fuisse, nempe quòd Christus aeternitate donatus fuit, et à mortuis, (mortuos hîc intelligo eo sensu, quo Christus dixit : sinite mortuos mortuos suos sepelire) surrexit, simulatque vitâ et morte singularis sanctitatis exemplum dedit, et eatenus discipulos suos à mortuis suscitat, quatenus ipsi hoc vitae ejus, et mortis exemplum sequuntur.

(Letter 75, Dec-Jan 1675-6, one year before his own death)

But you are going to say that all the apostles had completely believed that Christ rose again from death and really ascended to heaven: which I don’t deny. Well, even Abraham himself believed that God had lunch with him and all the Israelites [believed] that God, surrounded by fire, descended from heaven onto Mt Sinai, and that he spoke with them directly. These and many other things of the same type were apparitions or revelations adapted to the understanding and opinions of these people, by which God wished to reveal his mind to them. I conclude therefore that Christ’s resurrection from the dead was really spiritual and that it was revealed only to the faithful according to their understanding, indeed that Christ was granted with eternity, and that he rose from the dead (I understand the dead here in the sense in which Christ said: Let the dead bury their dead), by virtue of the fact that he gave an example of unique holiness by his life and death, and that he raises his disciples from the dead exactly inasmuch as they follow this example of his life and death.

La bourse ou la vie

Radios et journaux ne parlent que de la baisse des actions boursières. Mais on ne parle jamais du travail des gens, aide-soignants par exemple: les bras vont-ils baisser de 10% demain, suite aux caracolements de la bourse? D’ailleurs, pourquoi la page de Business n’est-elle pas appelée la page du Travail?
Réaction des gouverneurs de banque et de la Réserve Fédérale (« Réserve »! de quoi? il n’y a de réserve que de crédit, confiance accordée aux uns et aux autres parce qu’ils sont de bonne foi, dans une chaîne sans fin): baisser le taux d’intérêt immédiatement, avant l’ouverture des cours à New York, de 0.75%, ce qui veut dire qu’à leur réunion prévue pour lundi, ce taux pour les prêts de banque à banque sera de nouveau diminué, probablement de 0.5%, puisque l’essai de calmer le jeu ce matin n’aura mené qu’à de nouveaux calculs par les investisseurs que la Réserve Fédérale leur fera un autre cadeau, pour protéger leurs acquis, lundi prochain. Et si cela marche, ne serait-ce pas simplement parce que tout le monde comptera sur une nouvelle vague de commercialisme où principalement le consommateur américain achètera encore plus à crédit? Jusqu’où ira-t-on dans ce jeu de crédit?

On allegory

Parables have been a main object of allegorization. What is allegorization? Some time, I’ll give the history of the process, and why it is a very fruitful and logically sensible way of interpreting texts. First moment, one will present not only the Alexandrian school, but its influence on Jewish textual practices, Philo as textbook case, Origen as one of the great allegorizers. Second moment, sometimes corollary of the first, the misuse of allegory, and the free-for-all allegorization, right up to our modern and less modern preachers, in whose hands and mouths allegorization became a political and moral weapon rather than an instrument of discovery and return to the text. Hence a third moment, with late XIXth century exegetes, and first of all with Jülicher and followers, who wish to escape the intellectually sterile world of allegory (the reason for this being that as the Christianized world, in its successful capitalist incarnation, has moved away, or thinks it has moved away from ancient modes of production and their accompanying fidelities or forms of group thinking, it becomes necessary to free also the individual as moral being and kantify him, or in other words, to enlarge one’s economic freedom to a freedom of thought in regard to a model in which the allegory is one-directional. A form of late cartesianism, with the usual suspension of the divine). We are now in a fourth moment: a return to allegory as an instrument of discovery (reasoning by analogy), but with the possibility that not only the one-directionality has been put aside for good, in favor of a multi-directionality (controlled: i.e. we know how to use the tools: history, sociology, anthropological questions, etc.), but that the terms of the analogies set up in the allegorizing moment are better understood as revelations. An important point about the parabolic form: it allows the listeners to confront the truth(s) of their situation indirectly, unthreateningly. For instance, in Luke 16.1–11,a frightening thought on the nature of God and hence on the nature of society is hidden yet approachable through the paradoxical form of the story of the unfaithful steward.

Politics of the day

The president was in Israel, Palestine (a few minutes), Bahrein, etc. It is a constant surprise to hear him talk about peace, though to be fair, he speaks of it only after security, freedom, etc., as a sort of automatic by-product. He had the obligatory mention concerning the settlements: they must stop. One wants to ask him: which? the present extensions on Har Homa and Ma’alei Adumim? Or all of them? He doesn’t mention UN Resolution 242, or at least I haven’t heard him say it. And I remember him a number of years ago speaking of “facts on the ground” that would have to be taken into account, just the language Ariel Sharon and others on the right hoped to hear.
Back to the US: I wish I could believe in Clinton, but distrust the way she is making the kind of close calculations her husband did. After Bill Clinton’s election in 92, it was disappointing, to say the least, to see him delegate the vital issue of national health to his wife and not be willing to spend essential political capital himself on this project. I thought at the time she should have been the president. But now? Would she be able to tackle such an issue any more sucessfully now, let alone phase out the military adventures in the Middle East and in Asia? I think political calculations would take over…

Meanwhile, the governor in California speaks of tightening the budgetary belt. He was happy enough to buy votes by cancelling taxes (DMV) once upon a time. Happy to issue a lot of bond paper too, as his predecessors. Happy to pick the pockets of school districts, promise them the money would be returned, which didn’t happen. And now he is going to pick what crumbs are left in public pockets…

Animaux-mots

Again on speciesism, meta-post-humanism, etc. La critique dans un souterrain. I understand it is impossible to return to the negative aspects of the Aufklärung and its all-too-clear “speciesism”, political and intellectual authoritarianism, etc. Also understood that the dichotomy subjet/world is a source of illusions.

Au diable l’ontologie?

If the solution as I understand Derrida, Wolfe, Haraway, etc., is to recognize (and transform?) all forms of life into kinds of osmotic membranes, passages, or nodes for fluxes of information, that are “embedded” or “embodied”, why not go back all the way to a clear concept like that of the incarnation and redemption? How are you going to base an ethics on this neo-materialist notion of a repetition ad infinitum of information systems? Isn’t it a ready-to-wear language in its vulnerability and elasticity for the banking, insurance and bio-informatics industry? Isn’t the absence of a subject or its fluidity also a perfectly rational cover for corporations (= legal fictional persons) fundamentally interested in limiting their exposure and expenditures?

But rather, to become peregrine (like millions of workers), to dematerialize oneself for others, without preconceived limit, since the limit or the subjet lives in the jettisoning of all that was an illusion of it, and hope for the grace of a new creation, isn’t this old, familiar territory, to hearers of the Bible, gospels, Paul, Augustine?

Animals

Cary Wolfe (Rice University) spoke today about Animal Studies, Disciplinarity, and the Posthumanities: can one fish or retrieve something inerrantly human, after the fraying of human nature at the hands of biology since the XIXth century and now in the middle of a frantic and ever-expanding commercialization and commoditization that know of no solution of continuity from plants or animals to humans (add other -zations at will)? Nussbaum in one corner of the ring (post-Aristotelian-cum-Rawls yeah), Derrida in the other (vielleicht, suivez mon regard, ou plutôt celui de mon chat). Serious topic, and the bass continuo I was hearing in Wolfe’s speech was that any attempt at grounding a “humanity,” no matter the theoretical dicing, slicing or listing, is still and ever about preserving power, while the recognition of a common vulnerability might be ground for care, restraint, a “do no harm” philosophy, and perhaps resistance to the powers that be. A fully recognized humus for a new, broader, unexpected humanity. Vulnerability, which invites silence.

The lecture was in the Humanities building. A mind follows its eyes and wanders back and forth from the barky sequoias to the loquacious homines erecti

La nature est un temple où de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers.

Is this regard familier, hypostatized in his paradigmatic cat, what Derrida was puzzling about for so long, as his posthumously published ruminations on animalia (neuter) seem to indicate? Baudelaire for one is fascinated (and willing to be wounded?) by the claws, electrum, cold abyss, of cat-woman in

Le Chat

Viens, mon beau chat, sur mon coeur amoureux;
Retiens les griffes de ta patte,
Et laisse-moi plonger dans tes beaux yeux,
Mêlés de métal et d’agate.

Lorsque mes doigts caressent à loisir
Ta tête et ton dos élastique,
Et que ma main s’enivre du plaisir
De palper ton corps électrique,

Je vois ma femme en esprit. Son regard,
Comme le tien, aimable bête
Profond et froid, coupe et fend comme un dard,

Et, des pieds jusques à la tête,
Un air subtil, un dangereux parfum
Nagent autour de son corps brun.

Back to posthumanities, in which the “post” keeps confusing me. The Humanities building sits among trees whose ancestors have seen mule trains drag logs and carts of lime that went to build roads and cities from which UC emerged.

Animals had something in common with humans once, and still do in many parts of the world. Out of necessity, people lived very close to them. Horses, cows, pigs, hens even, were (could be) at the center of a modest farmer’s preoccupations. Have you ever seen a cart-driver speak quiet words to the head horse in a team pulling too heavy a load, the horse responding with all its strength, the pride to follow, oats, water and scrubbing… No distantiating romanticism here for those working from morning to dawn in the busy seasons of ploughing, planting, weeding, harvesting.

The necessity is gone in an industrial world whose logic dictates that animal life be seen as production, unnameable, transformable matter: transformable i.e. monetizable, with the same fate awaiting us soon? “Logic” of production and consumption, greed hiding behind logic: a strikingly narrow logic that is suffocating.  How can one breathe better?

San Diego

Last weekend, I participated in the Annual Society of Biblical Literature Congress held at San Diego: a short paper on the appropriateness of models in descriptions of first-century Roman Palestine. In this case, it was about the “Image of Limited Good” model adopted by members of the Jesus Context Group. This model comes from the research done on a traditional peasant society (Tzintzuntzan) in the forties, fifties and sixties by George Foster, a sociologist from UC Berkeley.

But it is not the use of models in ancient history or of deductive vs inductive methods that was of the greatest interest to me. What was once more most puzzling and disturbing was that I was at the center of one of the great cities in the US to talk about the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels, which on the whole are about social justice. Here we were, about ten thousand scholars, scholars-to-be, book people and so forth, filling up the big hotels of the area and the Convention Center. It was the usual well-organized madness. However consuming the madness, however, it couldn’t make one forget the reality of roads, banking webs anchored in the sky-scrapers around us, electronic networks, the assymetry of labor relations (there was a partial, discrete, strike against the Hilton chain going on), the not-so-hidden beggary, and especially the military ships across the bay and the large bases not so distant from the city.

Talking about ancient empires, labor relationships of the past, or degrees of acculturation (“hellenization”), was strange. And modelling certainly didn’t work. As post-moderns are finally beginning to realize, any and all critical theorizing, or tooling of intellectual and social realities, can be worked back into the machinery one thinks one is criticizing. What is left, ποίησις?

Feinstein and torture

Senator Feinstein, who is on the Senate Judiciary Committee, decided to support Mr. Mukasey’s nomination to the Attorney General position. Mukasey’s refusal to answer questions regarding the definition of torture was not enough for Feinstein to reject him. For her, it was sufficient that he was better than Alberto Gonzales. Together perhaps with the hope that a future Congress might ban “certain interrogation techniques” and Mukasey (or heirs) would support such Congress’ decisions as constitutional? How low we have sunk: “decent” jurists and senators in effect publically accept “interrogation techniques” (=torture) they would instantly reject if practiced by other countries on US citizens. Perfect example for the dictatorial regimes our foreign policies seem to sow or strengthen by the day…