Performing the Covenant: Akedah and the Origins of Masculinity — Page 8:
“The Gift of Death,” Masculinity, and the Covenant of Circumcision
36 The Western ethics of faith and responsibility warranted by the covenant between God and Abraham is founded on the rhetoric of the gift of death. It is a masculine affair, finalized by the covenant of circumcision: “Obedience to God over-rides paternal affection. As a result Abraham not only receives his son but he also merits the divine ratification of the earlier promised covenant of circumcision” (Alexander 21). The act of circumcision, the physical inscription of the divine power on the male body, finalizes the bond between the men: the phallic experience of shed blood becomes a symbolic act of patriarchal unity.[14]See also Alexander, T. D. (). "Genesis 22 and the Covenant of Circumcision". <em>JSOT</em> 25 (1983): 17–22; and Erling, B. "Firstborn and Firstlings in the Covenant Code." <em>SBL Seminar</em>, (1986): 470–478. Eilberg-Schwartz wonders why the covenant is signed on the penis. If blood is crucial, why not another part of the body?[15]According to Islam, Muhammad was born without a foreskin (a condition medically known as aposthia), and Muslims practice circumcision in order to be like him. And why, by the same token, is women’s blood “filthy, socially disruptive, and contaminating”? (Delaney 99).
37 Faith and responsibility, reenacted by the rhetoric of the gift of death, find their locus in the bleeding phallus. The blood of the phallus becomes the symbol of the sacred. Delaney argues that Abraham’s “penis is the site and guarantee of the covenant [. . .]. It was the sign of the covenant God made with Abraham, a promise—engraved on the flesh of the male sexual organ—that he would be a father of nations” (96). In Biblical Hebrew, there is no word for “penis”; the word used to designate it is “basar,” which also means “flesh.” Circumcision becomes a condition of the sacred, performed through the rhetoric of death and sacrifice. It is in the penis that man finds the inner voice of God: he speaks to God through and from his penis. “The rite of circumcision appears to recognize the power of the father as it is transmitted from God by means of the male organ” (Delaney 100). Boyarin, on the other hand suggests that the covenant of circumcision is actually symbolic feminization /demasculininzation of the male child. Boyarin writes: “The East European Jewish ideal of [feminized male] does have origins that are very deeply rooted in traditional Jewish culture, going back at least in part to the Babylonian Talmud [. . .]. The Jewish ideal male as countertype to ‘manliness’ is an assertive historical product of Jewish culture” (2-4). As outsiders, Jewish males defined themselves against the hypermasculinity of the repressive culture, and circumcision was a symbolic act redefining that self-definition.
38 Eilberg-Schwartz points out that the feminization of the Jewish male has a larger context: “Marriage and sexuality are frequent biblical metaphors for describing God’s relation with Israel. God is imagined as the husband to Israel the wife; espousal and even sexual intercourse are metaphors for the covenant. Thus when Israel follows other god’s, ‘she’ is seen to be whoring” (3). Eilberg-Schwartz continues:
By imagining men as wives of God, Israelite religion was partially able to preserve the heterosexual complementarity that helped to define the culture. But this also undermined accepted notions of masculinity [. . .]. The feminization of men also disrupted what the tradition posits as a natural complementarity between a divine male and human women. When male-female complementarity is the structure of religious imagery, human women are the natural partners of a divine male, but this connection also renders human males superfluous in the divine-human relationship [. . .]. [T]he potential superfluousness of human masculinity may offer additional insights into the misogynist tendencies of ancient Judaism: women were deemed impure and men were feminized in contradiction to what in this religious culture was a natural complementarity between the divine male and human females. (3-4)
Symbolically then, the circumcision binds men to each other, and Abraham to God. The sacred resides on the crossroads between rhetoric and performative: it represents the nonrepresentable of power and agency. The phallus stands in for the performative and rhetorical that exists nowhere but in language. The rhetoric of the sacrificial logic, thus, signifies nothing beyond itself. Placed outside of the economy of the sacred, femininity exposes its fundamental impossibility: the secret that there is no secret, the gift which is not.
39 Since woman’s sacrifice (woman as a subject of the sacrifice) is inscribed within the sacrifice of a woman (woman as an object of the sacrifice), her death is intrinsic to her very being, and thus can never really gain the status of a gift: it is a gift that is a mimesis of a gift. It functions as a gift between men and God, but it can never function as her gift. Because woman functions as a gift (in Levi-Strauss’ sense as well), her position as an agent of her own sacrifice is necessarily erased. As Rubin pointed out:
If it is women who are being transacted, then it is the men who give and take them who are linked, the woman being a conduit of a relationship rather than a partner to it [. . .]. To enter into a gift exchange as a partner, one must have something to give. If women are for men to dispose of, they are in no position to give themselves away. (174–175)
Woman can never “give herself” without fulfilling her feminine in-itself of the gift. She cannot transcend her being a gift by turning herself into a gift. Because she is always already a priori an object of the gift, her gift is not an act of will, and hence it is not a gift that would structure her position as an ethical subject. In an interview with Christie McDonald, Derrida (1997) once asked: “What kind of ethics would there be if belonging to one sex or another became its law or privilege? What if the universality of moral laws were modeled on or limited according to the sexes? What if their universality were not unconditional, without sexual condition in particular?” (35). What if. . . ?