Christ Circumcised. Andrew S. Jacobs
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that it became “normal” for early Christians to desire theological and social unity and “normal” for them to strive for this unity through the identification, classification, and rejection of difference.12 It is one goal of this book to move a step beyond both the “traditional model” and the Bauer-inspired counternarratives by interrogating their shared assumptions about sameness and difference, namely, the centrality of boundaries and exclusion in the shaping of early Christian identities.
When we take as normative the process of defining the self through the exclusion of difference, we gloss over some of the complex internal dynamics that shaped Christianity throughout the ancient period. It is of course self-evident that our early Christian sources quite frequently speak of “boundaries” and “others” and deviance and difference, and frequently profess a desire for exclusion, uniformity, and singularity. But what if such totalizing language serves not as a clue to a sincere desire for theological unity, but rather as a mask lightly covering over persistent—even necessary—fragmentation and dissolution? What if the singular language of orthodoxy does not seek to exclude, but rather to internalize and appropriate the so-called deviance of the other? What if the failure of this constant boundary formation to achieve such unity was not a bug but rather a feature of the discourses of early Christian difference? How would our perception of early Christian identity change, and what would this do to our assumptions about the very invention of the category of “religion” in the crucial period of late antiquity?
The Fantasy of Boundaries
The socioanthropological model of boundary formation and exclusion is not the only theoretical tool available to us in addressing the historical problem of Christian difference. A different theory of the interaction of difference and identity comes from the tradition of psychoanalysis, rearticulated recently in feminist and postcolonial appropriations of the work of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and others.13 Already, historians of the premodern period have made convincing (and appropriately contingent) cases for the use of a theory formed in the heart of modernity as a lens to reconfigure earlier subjects and topics.14 Psychoanalytically informed theories of subjectivity and personhood, quite apart from any universalizing claims, provide (I suggest) a compelling and useful model for rethinking our historical narratives of early Christian difference.
In these models, “self” (and, by extension, participation in a coherent community of “selves,” such as races, genders, or nations) is a partially realized fantasy from which the “other” is never completely separated. In this understanding of personhood, the “other” is for the “self” simultaneously an object of identification and distinction. There are no real boundaries; there is never exclusion.
Lacan famously drew on the idea of a child regarding herself in the mirror, realizing herself as a subject through the imperfect “other” reflected there: at once recognizable as the “self” (“she moves when I move, she looks like me”) yet intuitively other, apart from the self (“she’s over there, I’m here”), with a smooth integrity the child does not experience in her own porous and uncooperative body.15 As Terry Eagleton puts it, “The object is at once somehow part of ourselves—we identify with it—and yet not ourselves, something alien…. For Lacan, the ego is just this narcissistic process whereby we bolster up a fictive sense of unitary selfhood by finding something in the world with which we can identify.”16 “Self” in its broadest sense then emerges out of an act of misrecognition, and this “fantasy of ego” perpetuates the mistaken notion that subjectivity is stable, bounded, and discrete. In reality, “I” exist by virtue of my fantasies of an “other” that is really just a reminder of that smoothed-out reflection of my own psyche. “The subject constructs itself in the imitation of as well as opposition to this image,” asserts Ania Loomba.17 Whatever sense of self I possess is an illusion that emerges out of fragmentary and imaginary negotiations of unreal and ideal selves and others. The “other” is not only an object of distinction and difference by which I know myself (the “not-I”) but also an object of desire and identification for myself (the “ideal-I”). Identity is always already split against itself at the moment of its formation between “self” and “other.” No boundary between self and other persists, except as a fantasy of identity. Because my subjectivity emerges out of a scene of imaginary boundaries between my “self” and “others,” it is inherently unstable: it shifts and reconstitutes itself according to myriad psychic and material pressures and forces. It desires wholeness and a sense of permanence—thus the insistence on “myself,” a coherent subjectivity that can speak in the first person—but that desire is constantly, and sometimes thrillingly, frustrated.18 The sense of self is therefore always accompanied by anxiety and ambivalence.
Whether or not my internal psyche or yours actually operates this way is unfalsifiable, and to some extent irrelevant for my purposes. It is when we turn this model of subjectivity outward, into the realm of social relations, that I find it becomes illuminating and helpful. When we think of the boundaries of community along these same lines, as fantasies that both create and uncreate communal cohesion, we view the formation of such identities, and their disruption, quite differently. Take, for instance, the articulation of gender as a social category. On a socioanthropological model of gender construction, “male” comes to exist by distinction from and exclusion of “female.” A boundary is formed between self (“male”) and other (“female”); to cross that boundary is to transgress it knowingly in an act of deviance, whether we find such gender deviance laudable or not. Any attempt to critique the normativity of the male self—say, a feminist critique—must therefore operate from an a priori position of exteriority and marginalization: self and other, male and female, may be equalized but must remain bounded and distinct.
A feminist appropriation of psychoanalysis, however, presses that initial moment of differentiation and finds very different consequences. The articulation of “male” is not simply the recognition and rejection of “female.” Rather “female” is simultaneously an object of distinction and identification: it is never fully externalized, but always part of the male “self.” “Maleness” exists always in contradiction to itself, always reinternalizing and rejecting its other (“femaleness”). Sexism, from this perspective, is not the fear or oppression of an other, but rather the fear of the otherness within, the fear of the permeability of the self’s own boundaries. Likewise the critique of the seemingly privileged edifice of “maleness” does not take place from the distant margins but from that newly recovered place within. To cross the boundary between “male” and “female,” moreover, is not to transgress at all, but rather to acknowledge the illusory boundary between self (“male”) and other (“female”). It is also simply to acknowledge the inherent instability and shiftiness of those gender categories. In this reading, “gender relations” become politically and socially more open to intervention.19
Similar conclusions hold with our reading of other groups’ formations, such as race or nationhood. Instead of seeing the instability of racial categories or national identities as a sort of category failure—the desire to construct “whiteness” cannot outpace the messy realities of daily existence; the will-to-“Americanness” is constantly troubled by new and unexpected contingencies and border infiltrations—we instead read such instabilities as part of the very nature of categories: “whiteness” abhors but longs for its internalized racial otherness, “Americanness” shouts for borders that can never be securely established.20 The politics of race and nationhood become much more pliable and open to critique when we begin to see that the very attempt to bound and define constitutes a hidden act of dissolution and blurring.
Other scholars precede me (and instruct me) in the appropriation of psychoanalytic theories of identity deployed in the social field of history. Anne McClintock’s 1995 study Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest employs psychoanalytic frameworks to untangle the politics of race, gender, and class from Victorian England to postindependence South Africa. McClintock follows in the footsteps of postcolonial theorists from Frantz Fanon to Homi Bhabha,21 and feminist theorists such as Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigarary, all of whom have operated at the intersections of politically informed history and psychoanalytically informed theory: “Psychoanalysis