Christ Circumcised. Andrew S. Jacobs
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Christian theological assertions of orthodox unanimity with a healthy skepticism: no longer do we believe that heresy constitutes deviation from a continuous line of orthodox truth stretching back to Jesus. Yet we remain drawn to models of binary self-definition, imagining that orthodoxy constitutes a “self” coming into being in direct relation to a heretical “other,” a figure of opposition identified (or constructed) to sharpen the boundaries of individual and communal identity.4 There are, however, other ways of tracing the curious and complex methods by which individuals and groups define “self” and “other,” models that may, in fact, fit better the fluid cultural economies of late Roman identity, and illumine the strategies by which orthodox Christianity likewise strove for dominance.
Whereas anthropologists and sociologists might view the formation of the “self” as a scene of definitive rejection of the “other,” psychoanalytic theorists like Julia Kristeva (drawing, ultimately, on Freud and Lacan) speak of abjection:5 a violent expulsion of “otherness” that is, by virtue of its very processes, always incomplete and recursive.6 Elizabeth Grosz comments on abjection: “The subject must disavow part of itself in order to gain a stable self, and this form of refusal marks whatever identity it acquires as provisional, and open to breakdown and instability.”7 For Kristeva, the abject can be any reminder of that incomplete disavowal, which gives the lie to bodily and subjective coherence: food, excrement, a cadaver.8 The abject is neither object (Other) nor subject (Self); it occupies an uncomfortable “in-between” space that challenges the boundaries of identity. To confront the abject—in Kristeva’s psychoanalytic terms—is to confront the impossibility of my-self, to return to a moment (horrifying or purifying) before “I” existed.
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