Table of Contents

    Bennett-Carpenter - Quoting Mieke Bal’s Navel - JCRT 4.1

    Quoting Mieke Bal’s Navel: Contemporary Theory, Preposterous Religion

    Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter
    Catholic University of America

    I

    Art and literary theorist Mieke Bal may be read in terms of a philosophy or theory of religion in a genealogy that begins with Kierkegaard, runs through Nietzsche and Heidegger and concludes in the vicinity of Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, and Derrida.[1] With Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, hers is a post-Christendom, post-christian theory of religion that could be described at the outset as ‘preposterous.’ With Nietzsche and Heidegger, her critical and interpretive strategies circulate, not to attempt a circumvention of meaning, but to negotiate the limits of significant horizons. With Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, she follows a bodied phenomenology that can never extricate itself from the world and earth. With Derrida and Foucault, she is both deconstructive and post-structuralist as she moves amongst the play of signs and the rhetoric of resistance. Finally, she stands as an alternative to Baudrillard in a world of theory after Foucault and Derrida or, at least, in the midst of their traces.

    II

    III

    IV

    V

    Special thanks to Stephen Happel who introduced me to “Mieke Bal” and who offered significant feedback at several points during the writing of this article.

    Notes

    References

    Alice Bach.

    1991. [review of Murder and Difference and Death and Dissymmetry.] Union Seminary Quarterly Review 44/3-4: 333-341.

    Anderson, Janice Capel

    1991. [review of Lethal Love.] Critical Review of Books in Religion: 21-44.

    Bal, Mieke.

    1980. “Narrativite et manipulation,” Degres 8.

    1986. Femmes imaginaries. L’ancien testament au risque d’une narratologie critique. Utrecht: HES; Montreal: HMH; Paris: Nizet.

    1987a. Lethal Love: Literary Feminist Readings of Biblical Love Stories. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

    1987b. “Myth a la lettre.” In Discourse in Psychoanalysis and Literature, edited by Schlomith Rimmon-Kenan. London and New York: Methuen.

    1988a. Death and Dissymetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    1988b. Murder and Difference: Gender, Genre, and Scholarship on Sisera’s Death. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

    1989. “Literature and Its in Insistent Other.” [Review essay of The Literary Guide to the Bible, edited by Robert Alter and Frank Kermode.] JAAR 57 (Sum): 373-383.

    1990. [Review of Carol L Meyers, Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context.] JAAR 58 (Fall): 511-513.

    1991a. On Story-Telling: Essays in Narratology. Edited by David Jobling. Sonoma, California: Polebridge Press.

    1991b. Reading “Rembrandt”: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition. New York: Cambridge University Press.

    1994. On Meaning-Making: Essays in Semiotics. Sonoma, California: Polebridge Press.

    1997. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. 2nd (Revised and Expanded) Edition. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

    1998. “Back to the future: Art and its history.” Semiotica 119 3/4: 287-308.

    1999a. Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    1999b. “The Spirit as Parasite.” Western Humanities Review, Vol. 53, No. 4 (Winter): 315-325.

    2000. “Religious Canon and Literary Identity.” [Plenary Lecture, The Tenth Conference of the Society for Literature and Religion, ‘Literary Canon and Religious Identity’, 7-9 September, 2000, at the University of Nijmegen.] Lectio Difficilior: European Electronic Journal for Feminist Exegesis 2.

    2001. “Enfolding Feminism.” In Feminist Consequences: Theory for the New Century, 321-352. Edited by Elisabeth Bronfen and Misha Kavka. New York: Columbia University Press.

    Beal, Timothy K.

    1992. “Ideology and Intertextuality: Surplus of Meaning and Controlling the Means of Production.” In Reading Between Texts, 27-39. Edited by Dana Nolan Fewell. Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster / John Knox Press.

    Detweiler, Robert.

    1991. “Parerga: Homely Details, Secret Intentions, Veiled Threats.” Journal of Literature & Theology 5/1 (March): 1-10.

    Eliot, T.S.

    1951. Selected Essays, 3rd ed. London: Faber. Cited in Paul Giles (1992), American Catholic Arts and Fictions: Culture, Ideology, Aesthetics, 252. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    1975 [1919]. “Tradition and Individual Talent.” In Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, 37-44. Edited with introduction by Frank Kermode. London: Faber and Faber. Cited in Bal (1999a).

    Fewel, Danna Nolan; and David M Gunn.

    1990. “Controlling Perspectives: Women, Men, and the Authority of Violence in Judges 4-5.” JAAR 58 (Fall): 389-411.

    Greenspahn, Frederick E.

    1990. [Review of Murder and Difference.] Critical Review of Books in Religion: 103-105.

    Happel, Stephen.

    1993. “The Postmodernity of Judas: Religious Narrative and the Deconstruction of Time.” In Postmodernism, Literature, and the Future of Theology, 91-119. Edited by David Jasper. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

    Hartman, Geoffrey.

    2000 “Text and Spirit.” [Lecture delivered at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, on 14 April 1999]. In The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Vol. 21. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

    Jobling, David.

    1991. “Mieke Bal on Biblical Narrative” [review article]. Religious Studies Review 17 (Jan): 1-10.

    Kemp, Sandra.

    1992. [Review of Reading Rembrandt.] Journal of Literature & Theology 7: 302-305.

    Lynn, Greg.

    1993. “Body Matters.” Journal of Philosophy and the Visual Arts, Special Issue: The Body. Edited by Andrew Benjamin. ([no vol. or issue no.] 60-69. Cited in Bal (1999b).

    Parker, Patricia.

    1992. “Preposterous Events.” Shakespeare Quarterly 43/2:186-213. Cited in Bal (1999a).

    Raschke, Carl.

    1999. “Theorizing Religion at the Turn of the Millennium: From the Sacred to the Semiotic.” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 1:1 (December).

    2000. “Para/theology: The Study of Religion and the Science of the Negative.” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 2:1 (December).

    Serres, Michel.

    1982. The Parasite. Translated by Lawrence R. Schehr. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

    Taylor, Victor.

    1999. Para-Inquiry: Postmodern Religion and Culture. New York and London: Routledge.

    Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter is a doctoral student in religion and rhetoric at the Catholic University of America, Washington DC.

    ’ 2002 Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter. All rights reserved.
    Updated 07/28/21.
    http://jcrt.org/archives/04.1/bennett-carpenter/

    1. At least it is in this ‘tradition’ that I have sought to represent her in the following project. And perhaps in this case Kant stands as a matrix for the whole genealogy. Of course it is also possible to trace other genealogies; for example in a semiotic ‘tradition’ of Saussure and Barthes, along with Culler and Eco. This is not to mention narratological, psychoanalytic, or feminist ‘traditions’ to which she is indebted as well, nor even, in a certain sense, her close position to art historical figures like Duchamp, which I mention later. Certainly one of Bal’s strengths is her draw upon various ‘traditions’ or disciplines: she’s a true interdisciplinarian. I try here to orient the reader by way of one genealogy to begin with and to touch on the various others as the article proceeds. ↩︎

    2. Importantly Bal cites T.S. Eliot at the outset: “Whoever has approved this idea of order…will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past” (Bal 1975 [1919]). ↩︎

    3. In “The Spirit as Parasite” (Bal 1999b), Bal offers several ways in which the ambiguous three lettered conjunction can be read. Firstly, it can be read as an opposition such as ‘body and spirit’, ‘spirit and matter’, ‘word and image’, or ‘art and popular culture.’ In this case one is positioned against the other. And can also be read in terms of a metaphorical relationship. In this case, where and is we may read as: ‘text as body.’ Thirdly, the conjunction can be understood as an equivalence or as Bal puts it, an “almost identity.” Here, and occurs in phrases like ‘home and hearth’ or ‘sound and music’. Finally (yet not quite), and may indicate narrative sequence: this happened and then this happened and so forth (316-317). ↩︎

    4. The positioning of these terms together is also reminiscent of T.S. Eliot’s statement, “Genuine blasphemy, genuine in spirit and not purely verbal, is the product of partial belief, and is as impossible to the complete atheist as to the perfect Christian. It is a way of affirming belief” (Eliot, 1951). ↩︎

    5. Bal addresses criticisms of her alleged “ahistoricism” in her early collection of essays, On Story-Telling: Essays in Narratology (Bal 1991a: 14-23). ↩︎

    6. Here Bal is addressing more specifically “visual poetics” rather than “rhetoric” but I think provides a helpful way to visualize her understanding of rhetoric. And, as she writes later quite clearly, “rhetoric is as visual as it is verbal,” (69). ↩︎

    7. For more on ‘navel’ and its evolution in Bal’s thought, see her recent “Enfolding Feminism,” which appeared after the time of writing of this article, especially for its relation to the metaphor of the ‘fold’ (347-348). ↩︎

    8. Lethal Love is chronologically the first in a trilogy that also includes Death and Dissymetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges (Bal 1988a) and Murder and Difference: Gender, Genre, and Scholarship on Sisera’s Death (Bal 1988b). See David Jobling’s helpful review of the trilogy, “Mieke Bal on Biblical Narrative” (Jobling 1991). See also Bal’s “Literature and Its Insistent Other,” a review essay of The Literary Guide to the Bible, edited by Alter and Kermode (Bal 1989); Bal’s review of Carol L Meyers, Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context (Bal 1990); Janice Capel Anderson’s review of Lethal Love; Timothy K Beal, “Ideology and Intertextuality: Surplus of Meaning and Controlling the Means of Production” (Capel 32-35); Alice Bach’s review of Murder and Difference and of Death and Dissymmetry; Robert Detweiler, “Parerga: Homely Details, Secret Intentions, Veiled Threats”; Danna Nolan Fewel and David M Gunn, “Controlling Perspectives: Women, Men, and the Authority of Violence in Judges 4-5”; Frederick Greenspahn’s review of Murder and Difference; Jobling, “Feminism and ‘Mode of Production’ in Ancient Israel.” Jobling calls Death and Dissymmetry “stunning” and “the most ‘achieved’ of Bal’s trilogy.” Yet, “Lethal Love fell like a bombshell into our playground and at once extended the boundaries of our discipline [of biblical studies]” (Jobling 1991: 6, 9). ↩︎

    9. Until recently Bal has not explicitly addressed ‘religion’ or ‘the religious’. In her plenary address to the Society for Literature and Religion in September 2000, she describes her “significant negligence of religion.” Even with her work on fragments of the Bible and the Quran, she discussed them “as if they had nothing to do with religion.” Furthermore, although she acknowledges the “presence and cultural significance” of the so-called ‘turn to religion’, she states that she does “not share in this movement.” “I am not religious,” she states unequivocally; “I am not even sure I understand what religion is, outside of the institutional religions of which I want no part” (2000). Much could be said of these remarks, but what is important to note for our purposes at this particular point is that we are discussing the religious not in terms of Bal’s literal representation of herself but in terms of the interdiscursivity of a detail of Bal’s corpus. At this point, the meaning of her work cannot be reduced to her own explicit authorial intentions. Furthermore, Bal is now recognizing the explicit significance for ‘religion’ or ‘the religious’ of her work. This is precisely what this article is attempting to begin to articulate. Finally, her question of ‘what religion is, outside of the institutional religions’ is at the heart of what this article is asking by ‘quoting’ her ‘navel’. ↩︎

    10. It may be thought, for example, that a symbiotic relationship rather than a parasitical one might be a more suitable organic metaphor in relationship to the navel, especially as one thinks of the mother-child link signed by the navel. But my guess is that this may be too ‘homey’ for Bal, especially as she insists upon autonomy with dependence. This, however, remains for me an open question and problem. ↩︎

    11. “‘Paralogy’,” writes Stephen Happel, citing Lyotard, “can be understood to mean ‘a move played in the pragmatics of knowledge’, in which overlapping identities and differences are juxtaposed in such a fashion that all comparative elements are illuminated” (Happel 91, 115n). Also see Victor Taylor, Para-Inquiry: Postmodern Religion and Culture; and Raschke, “Para/theology: The Study of Religion and the Science of the Negative” (Raschke 2000). ↩︎