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Vol. 10
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[1] "that de-cision taken in me and without me"; Derrida 1993, 255-256.
[2] Pinar, 120: "Circumcision demarcates manhood, the point after which the son is regarded as a member of the tribe of Patriarchy. The wounded phallus and the scar that remains are a cattle-brand indicating ownership and gender identity."
[3] The Christian liturgical calendar celebrates January 1, the eighth day after the birth of Jesus, as the Feast of the Circumcision of Our Savior. Given the Freudian interpretation of the psychological scarring that circumcision causes, not only to the male child but to his parents as well, perhaps this should be called the Fast of the Circumcision, in penance for the sins of patriarchy inherent in the wounding of male children. And see Hoffman (7) on whether it is the day, or the rite, which is to be celebrated.
[4] Yet every circumcision is unique to the man who bears/bares it; Derrida 1986, 307, 336; 1993, 59-60.
[6] Or am I? In 1971, on my first trip to Israel, I had an overwhelming sense of having 'come home,' as if there were some sort of genetic reason for such a deep attachment. However, my family acknowledges no Jews in the family tree. I can only hypothesize: My paternal great-grandmother was named Katie Klopfenstein/Klophenstein. Her grandparents came from Grandvillars and Brochiller, in the Haute-Rhine, Alsace. Katie was one of 16 children, though only seven are named in the family tree: John, Hannah, Eli, Miriam, Joseph, Katie (born 1869), and Benjamin. Upon coming to America sometime in the early 1820s, the family identified as Mennonite, though in Katie's childhood her father became a Methodist minister. I am one of Katie's 69 great grandchildren, all of whom knew her. My own daughter Katie is named after her great-great-grandmother, in honor of the Jewish heritage that I believe I carry in my body, as invisible as the circumcision scar on an uncircumcised penis.
[7] My scars: "the circumcision of me, the unique one, that I know perfectly well took place, one time, they told me and I see it but I always suspect myself of having cultivated, because I am circumcised, ergo cultivated, a fantastical affabulation" (Derrida 1993, 59-60).
[8] See Grosz's chapter, "The Body as Inscriptive Surface." Freud believed that all men are wounded in their genitals. Uncircumcised men still bear such scars but canít see them, so it is harder for them to work through their own psychodynamics.
[9] The Latin 'prepuce' = pre + putos, or the pre-penis, so it is the same as the 'fore skin.'
[10] Apropos of nothing (!), the clitoris, mistaken for centuries by medical science as a 'tiny penis,' was known in the Viennese slang at the time of Freud as the Jud, or Jew; see Geller, 330 n5.
[11] According to medical literature, circumcision is the most common surgery performed on men in the world; see Latifoglu, et. al.
[13] Gen. 21:4; see Snowman 570 on some of the halakhic exceptions.
[14] Ishmael was circumcised by his father Abraham at age 13; see Gen. 17:25. But Islamic practices vary according to tribe and nation; the customary age seems to be between 5 and 12. See Morgenstern, 48-55.
[15] See Acts 3:1; 21:21; Romans 4:9-12; Galatians 2:3-9; 5:2-3, 6:12-15; 1 Cor. 7:18-19; Col. 2:11. On the Pauline attitude toward circumcision, see Collins.
[16] I need simply to look down to ascertain this information. We all need personal reminders of who we are, as Derrida points out in 1997, 19-20. According to BT Menachot 43b, David's sight of his own circumcision 'set his mind at ease,' reminding him that he was never without the observance of at least one precept. Geller (329) comments on George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, the eponymous hero of one of Freud's favorite books. "It takes some three-quarters of this eight-hundred-plus-page novel for Daniel to discover that he is of Jewish descent. Yet as Lennar David has quipped, 'What this has to mean...is that he never looked down.'" Derrida, 1993, 114-116, describes himself as "the only philosopher to my knowledge who will have dared describe his penis, as promised, in concise and detailed fashion."
[17] See, for example, Justin Martyr, Dialogue 19 and 33; Tertullian, Adv. Marc. 5.9 and Adv. Jud. 4. See also Greenblatt in Hillman and Mazio, 221-241.
[18] See Herdt 1984, Adam; and van Gennep, 82-84.
[19] See Macpherson, 181-182, on the Samoan practices of circumcision.
[20] John Chrysostom (c.347-407), In principium Actorum 3.1, Montfaucon 3.71C (unpublished translation by Arthur Bradford Shippee) speaks of "the Paradise of Scripture" as a walled garden with an abundant fountain and trees inside. A very similar reference can be found in the Gospel of Truth (Layton, 262), where paradise is God's perfection of thought, and the plants therein are God's verbal expressions of that thought-perfection.
[21] I have written on the medieval Christian schema in Culbertson, 1991; and on the medieval Jewish schema in Culbertson, 1995, chapter 2. I have applied these schema to the practice of psychotherapy in Culbertson, 1998.
[22] Freud, too, was very aware of the multiple meanings carried in any single entity. He likened the existence of these meanings beyond the literal, to what lies in the unconscious beyond the ego. According to DiCenzo (85-86): "The ego represses, covers up, and seeks to eliminate, while the unconscious or id preserves memory traces. Hence tensions, symptoms, and clues emerge as meaningful by-products of intra-psychic conflict. Similarly, gaps, contradictions, and other textual vicissitudes are not simply accidents of historical transmission and the oversights of numerous exegetical hands. Like dreams, parapraxes, and symptoms, they disclose hidden (or new) meaning irreducible to either of the conflicting agencies. Freud's discussion of textual vicissitudes opens the possibility of reading a text beyond itself--that is, in excess of its surface arguments. He thus anticipates the deconstructionist articulation of processes of dehiscence [splitting open or rupture of a seed pod or surgical wound] and dissemination [to scatter widely, as sowing seed] as features of meaning production."
[23] Derrida 1993, 108-111; see also 237-238 and 250-253, citing the rabbinic parable of The Four Who Entered Paradise (Tos. Hagigah 2:3-4, JT Hagigah 2.77b; Shir ha-Shirim Rabbah 1.4,1; BT Hagigah 14b).
[24] Derrida 1993, 120-121. In the search for levels of meaning, Derrida cites as one of his authorities St. Augustine (upon whose Confessions the Circumfession functions as a midrash): "And for me (and I am saying this from my heart, without any fear), were I writing something aimed at the highest authority, I should prefer to write in such a way that each man could take whatever truth about these things my words suggested, rather than to put down one true opinion so plainly as to exclude other opinions, even if there were no falsity in them to offend me" (Confessions XII, xxxi, 42; Outler 296); see Derrida 1993, 237. Elsewhere, he cites William Blake as an inspiration for seeking the "tropic dimensions"; Derrida 1986, 344. Both the Jewish and Christian interpretive schema, with their emphasis on multivocality, are echoed in the Freudian concept of "overinterpretation"; see Freud, "The Interpretation of Dreams" 6E and H in SE V:353 and 471, and DiCenzo, 7-8.
[25] Another example can be found in his four-fold reading of the 1586 El Greco painting "El Entierro del Conde de Orgaz" (The Burial of the Count of Orgaz), in Derrida 1993, 150-152.
[27] Derrida 1993, 13-15: "If one more circumcision delimited my lips, if my confession sucked at the truth that appeases and reassures, even without redemption, I would put an end to the being in perdition that I am, although I feel myself to be still kept in the prayer of my living mother."
[28] We have to be equally careful peeking into Derrida's underpants, though the psychodynamic intensity of his autobiographical graphics makes it hard not to see all that he reveals.
[29] Derrida prefers this term to Ricoeur's "polysemy"; see his Positions, translated by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 45. According to DiCenzo (7-8): "Derrida certainly accepts Ricoeur's notion of polysemy, but insists further on the creative fore of dissemination. This expands the dynamic of meaning production beyond an inherent plurivocity of discourse. It expresses an ongoing process that can never be reduced to the text or phenomenon in itself. An ever-shifting other or outside is necessarily operative in establishing the sense of a text. This outside might be understood in terms of context, as long as we bear in mind Derrida's caveat that 'no context can determine meaning to the point of exhaustiveness.' That is, no context is final or closed." Overinterpretation, polysemy, and dissemination parallel Mikhail Bakhtin's "polyglossia" (see Bakhtin, 65, 327, 366, 431).
[30] On reading meaning into body parts, see Hillman and Mazzio, xii: "The ontological status of the part is revealed again and again--to be in endless flux between the positions of subject and object: as vehicles of culture and symbolization, as organ with eerily individuated agencies, as objects of libidinal cathexes, as instruments of sentient experience, as imagined loci of self-knowledge and self-alienation."
[32] See Hoffman; Eilberg-Schwartz 141-176, and Snowman.
[33] Derrida 1986, 320, for example. Compare Ezekiel 44, Acts 7:51, as well as those Biblical passages where 'unclean' is a synonym for 'uncircumcised.'
[34] Derrida 1986, 320, 340-341, 346; Derrida 1993, 250-253, 309-310; Snowman 568.
[35] Hence Derrida's comparison of circumcision to a wedding ring; Derrida 1993, 114, 217-218, 255-256.
[36] Derrida 1993, 188-190, 244-246; 1997, 38.
[37] Derrida 1993, 70-73; van Gennep73 n2.
[38] Freud, "Moses and Monotheism," SE XXIII.81-82.
[40] At Derrida 1997, 38-39, he describes the cloths that bandage the recently-circumcised penis as 'shrouds.'
[41] Though it is not always clear whose identity is being inscribed. Derrida 1986, 328, 332, 344-346; Derrida 1993, 70-73, 93-95, 158-160, 188-190, 224, 291. On reading wounds, see Derrida 1986, 340; on reading bodies see Grosz.
[44] Derrida 1997, 26; Satlow 1996.
[47] Derrida 1993, 244-246. Circumcision was widely practiced to discourage masturbation; see Gilman 1998: 121, for an example from 1950s America. From the mid-19th century, it was believed that proper diet could moderate sexual desire, including the urge to masturbate. For that reason, both the Graham Cracker and Kellog's Cornflakes were invented; see Sokolow. On masturbation and prayer, particularly in relation to the tallith (prayer shawl), see Derrida 1997, 19-20, 45-46.
[51] According to Snowman 572-75, Philo was the first Jewish writer to advance hygienic reasons for circumcision; De Circumcisione 11:210. See DeNoon, for example, on the increasing number of medical studies which argue that circumcision + safer sex is the best preventative against contracting HIV.
[52] Derrida 1986, 336; Snowman 575.
[54] The aspect of 'aesthetic' is under significant fire from some quarters of the contemporary men's movement, who instead refer to circumcision as 'male genital mutilation.' Various methods are suggested to men who wish to restore their foreskins. Biblical precedent for such restoration can be found at 1 Macc. 1:15; the surgery is called epispasm (Snowman, 568) or epipost (Ginzburg, IV.284).
[56] According to Ginzberg v.29, Bereshit Rabbah 66.3 and parallels "remark that nature does not produce anything quite ready for use, but expects man to improve upon its creations. This applies to a man's body which becomes perfect after its natural state has been improved upon by circumcision." Hillman and Mazio, 181, cite Aristotle's famous formula that the female is an "imperfect male."
[58] Pinar, 117: "Father's authority is communicated by his pretentious seriousness, his virility, his cold capacity to oppose and suppress the Other when he judges it necessary, to compete for scarce commodities (and to keep them scarce), by sons who serve as his policemen, his military, his bureaucrats, his rebels (who underline his importance as they keep him mobilized), and by women who praise his achievements, attend to his wounds, and do his dirty work."
[59] Derrida 1997, 40. According to Worth 1996:129, "sexual difference plays a central role in Derrida's work."
[61] Derrida 1993, 280; Pinar, 120.
[63] "The penis will not behave: now a penis, now a phallus, the one when we wish the other, it is itself a text that we can barely read, even with double-vision. It seems not one thing but two. The phallus is haunted by the penis and vice versa. It has no unified social identity, but is fragmented by ideologies including race and ethnicity." (Culbertson 1998)
[64] The break between Freud and his student Carl Jung is notorious, but Freud was almost ultimately rejected by his colleagues and students Alfred Adler, Karen Horney, Helene Deutsch, Wilhelm Fliess, Melanie Klein, and Otto Rank, to name just some. On Freud's break with Jung and Adler, see Gay 197-243. The parallels with the classic Oedipal struggle are obvious.
[65] The structure and theories in Totem and Taboo are explored in Palmer, chapter 2, and Gay, 324-335.
[66] Freud, "Moses and Monotheism," section 2D, in SE XXIII.81.
[70] Freud's two most famous cases which deal with the issue of neurosis and castration anxiety are "Little Hans" and "The Wolf Man." See Gilman 1993, 77-89 and 1998, 95-98.
[71] Oedipus, it will be remembered, is he of Greek mythology who killed his father and married his mother. On the Primal Father and the Oedipus complex, see Gay, 329-335; on "Little Hans," Oedipus, and castration, see Gay 257-260.
[72] Freud also refers to this story with admiration; see "Moses and Monotheism," SE XXIII.26, 44. The source of some of the details in Derrida's imagery is difficult to trace. The Exodus 4:24-26 text is expanded on in BT Nedarim 32a; and see Ginzberg II.295, 328; V.423-424, n149. But I have not yet been able to locate the source of his idea that Zipporah 'ate' the foreskin; as the circumciser, should would have had to staunch the flow of blood by sucking on Eliezer's penis, but this does not seem to be the same as 'eating.' The Talmudic passage says that two angels disguised as 'snakes,' named Af and Hemah ("wrath" and "anger"), came and swallowed Moses up. Of course, a man head-first inside a snake would look rather much like a penis in a foreskin. To touch Moses's 'feet' is probably a euphemism for genitals: the blood of Eliezer's circumcision touched to Moses's own mark of circumcision.
[73] Mohel: a ritual circumciser in Jewish tradition. [74] Metsitsah: the mohel's action of sucking the circumcision wound to stem the flow of blood. The history of the practice is explained in Gilman 1993, 68-70.
[76] Melanie Klein, student of Freud's, argued that the cannibalistic mother is even scarier for young girls than for young boys. The mother seeks to cannibalize not only the boyís penis, but the girl's as-yet-unborn children from her young womb. See Klein 1926, 232 n.1; 1928, 74-75; 1929, 92; 1955, 48; and Hinshelwood, 62. On Klein and 'womb-envy,' see Minsky, 78-109. On cannibalism as the primary form of identification, see Freud, "Mourning and Melancholy," SE XIV, 249-251, 255-256.
[77] Derrida's images and language come from Freud's theory of penis envy: "Freud's metalanguage then resorts to the opposable figures of hiding or veiling (verdenken, verhüllen) on the one hand, and of uncovering (Entdeckung, Erfindung) on the other, still with a view to analysing the motivations which might push the woman to invent, discover, unveil--and hide. No doubt one thinks that women have contributed little to the history of civilisation by their 'discoveries and inventions' (Entdeckungen und Erfindungen). But they have discovered (erfunden), uncovered one technique, that of braiding and weaving. The unconscious motive of this 'discovery'? Hiding, veiling a 'defect of the genital organs.' So they discovered with a view to veiling. They have unveiled the means of veiling. In truth, looking more closely, over Freud's shoulder, they have discovered nothing at all, all they did was imitate, since Nature, dame 'Nature', making pubic hair grow at puberty, had already 'given,' [Freud] says, a model, a paradigm (Vorbild) for what was basically only an 'imitation' (Nachahmung). This pubic hair already hides, it dissimulates, it veils (verhüllt) the genital organs. For this feminine 'technique,' only one further step was necessary: make the threads or fibres (Fasern) hold together, intertwine them from where they were stuck on the body right on the skin, merely bushy, mixed up, felted (verflizt)." (Derrida 1997, 29)
[80] See Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering, on mothers' projecting 'eroticized otherness' onto their sons; see also Pinar, 105.
[82] Gilman, 1993, 86; Derrida 1993, 93-95, 221, 297. Perhaps for this reason, Derrida describes himself as "the last of the Jews" (Derrida 1993, 153-154). The date of Derrida's own circumcision was July 23, 1930, his mother's birthday; Derrida 1993, 108.
[83] When I delivered this paper at a conference in Auckland in June, 2000, a man in the audience told me later that when he was growing up in Wales 50 years ago, it was not uncommon for mothers there to fellate their infant sons in order to encourage their foreskins to stretch so that they could retract properly during penile erection. I have also been told that a similar custom is traditional to Puerto Rican culture. In both cases, this is constructed as a mother's job, not a father's.
[84] This seems to be a narrative of a laughing woman who breaks the patriarchal taboo around mother-son sexual activity. Of course the son here is not an infant, since he is capable of ejaculation.
[86] Derrida 1993, 153-154: "let people see it how I see it on my sex each time blood is mixed with sperm or the saliva of fellatio, describe my sex throughout thousands of years of Judaism, describe it (microscopy, photography, stereo-phototypy) until the paper breaks, make all the readers drool, wet lips, high and low, stretched out in their turn on the cushions, right on the knees of 'godfather' Elie..."