1.1 Three in One, One in Three
A profound hostility to logos permeates every aspect of modern, and especially of postmodern culture. This book argues that this anti-logocentrism depends upon the attribution of efficacious power to performative signs of all kinds, including the linguistic, religious, aesthetic, erotic, and, most prominently today, the financial (the Spanish word for âcash,â efectivo, eloquently conveys modern moneyâs performative function). But the modern era is only the latest in a long historical series of dialectical clashes between logos and eidolon. The following chapters examine a selection of such conflicts drawn from a wide variety of local contexts, from ancient Ionia to postmodern Yorubaland. They also deal with what may, at first, appear to be an unfeasibly diverse range of issues. In the course of writing the book, however, I have found that the ostensibly infinite expressions of anti-logocentrism tend, in practice, to flow into three main channels. These three manifestations of anti-logocentrism rise and fall together throughout history, although their simultaneous advance is particularly conspicuous in the twenty-first century. In fact, their association is so frequent and so intimate as to suggest that they are, in reality, different forms of appearance taken by a single essence. Before examining specific cases, it will be useful to consider these three prominent forms of rebellion against logos, to ask what they may have in common, and to raise the question of their relevance to the postmodern condition.
Anti-logocentrism has historically manifested itself in âusury,â âidolatry,â and non-reproductive sexualityâtraditionally known as âsodomy.â The early modern era often conceived of usury, sodomy, and idolatry as vices practiced by marginalized and stigmatized social groups. Usury was associated with Jews, sodomy with homosexuals, and idolatry with the natives of the colonized world. The tendency to personify such psychological tendencies, to project them onto alien groups of people, bespeaks the ideological error of âreification.â Reification involves misconceiving something that is actually spiritual or abstract as if it were concrete or material. As a consequence of this error, popular opposition to usury, sodomy and idolatry has frequently been directed against particular groups of human beings, and channeled into such morally repellent dead-ends as anti-Semitism, homophobia, and racism. It is now time to consign such errors permanently to the past, and this book hopes to make a small contribution to that process. The postmodern condition proves that all human beings are equally vulnerable to the machinations of anti-logos. Today, critics of anti-logos must understand their opponent as an abstract, conceptual force capable of exerting its influence upon anybody.
The term âusuryâ has historically referred to a vast range of economic sharp practice, including the mere intention to make illegitimate or excessive profit, and the payment as well as the taking of interest. It was once seen as a well-nigh universal temptation. By the seventeenth century, however, the demands of the early capitalist economy necessitated a redefinition. A convenient fantasy developed that usury was the exclusive preserve of pariahsâthat it was a sin practiced only by others.1 A literalist interpretation of the Deuteronomic prohibition2 made it seem plausible that Jews permitted themselves to take interest from Christians. At the same time, legal restrictions effectively coerced many of Europeâs Jews into money-lending, while simultaneously limiting that profession to them in theory (though certainly not in practice). As a result, the terms âusurerâ and âJewâ remained virtually synonymous through the century of Trollope, Marx, Dostoevsky, and Wilde and, as we shall see in Chapter 7, well into the century of Hemingway, Pound, and Eliot. During the modern age, then, usuryâs true nature was concealed by its association with a specific group of people.
Usuryâs influence on subjectivity has always been profound and today, as Maurizio Lazzarato concludes: âDebt is the technique most adequate to the production of neoliberalismâs homo economicus.â3 Economic man is not necessarily an individual agent, however, and over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the characteristics once seen as typical of individual usurers were assimilated into the wider, macro-economic structures that Bernard Dempsey called âinstitutional, or systemic usury.â4 Writing in 1943, Dempsey argued that usury should no longer be regarded as an aberration practiced by outcasts, but as the very essence of the modern economy. The ethical implication of Dempseyâs theory was that, in the words of D. Stephen Long, âour modern economic system creates the effect of usury without personal culpability.â5 The usurious economy remained ethically reprehensible tout court, at least according to traditional standards, but this was no longer an issue of personal morality.
The same is increasingly true of concupiscent sexuality, or âsodomy,â which is no more aberrational than usury in the postmodern context. It is important to remember that âsodomyâ is not exclusive to homosexuality. It was not particularly associated with homosexuality until the Enlightenment. Before the eighteenth century, as we shall see in the following chapters, the term might be used of any sexual act which was not aimed at reproduction, and all such acts were deemed unnatural. In fact, âsodomyâ was often just as likely to denote commercial sex as homosexuality: the King James Bible (1611) gives âsodomitressâ as a translation of âwhore.â6 If we seek a twenty-first century equivalent of âsodomy,â the merged prostitution and pornography so prevalent on the internet might be the closest. The vice could involve any erotic focus on the body, regardless of gender, and it could manifest itself in any non-procreative sexual act, including masturbation. The idea that sodomy might be restricted to âhomosexualsâ or âqueersâ is specific to modernity7 and, like usury, the concept of sodomy is distorted when conceived as limited to any particular group of people.
As we shall see in the following chapters, sodomy and usury have always been closely related, in theory and in practice. The Aristotelian and Biblical traditions treat them as logically homologous as well as empirically inseparable. Furthermore, sodomy and usury are traditionally classified as sub-species of idolatry, on the grounds that both vices make fetishizes of symbols. Usury conceives of financial symbols as sexual and fertile, while sodomy prioritizes the bodyâwhich in the Platonic tradition is conceived as the sign of the soulâabove its referent. The association of usury, sodomy, and idolatry has deep roots in Scripture, where St. Paul repeatedly declares that âcovetousness is idolatry.â8 The Hebrew Bible warns against âwhoring after strange gods,â9 and in Paulâs epistle to the Romans those who âchanged the glory of the uncorruptible God into an imageâ (1.23) are given over to âvile affections, for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward anotherâ (1.26â27). Paul emphasizes that sodomy is an appropriate consequence of idolatry, describing the men as âreceiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meetâ (1.27). Following the Platonic tradition, he conceives of the body as the sign of the soul, and of sexual concupiscence as an idolatrous fetishism of the sign to the exclusion of the referent.
The sin of sodomy thus traditionally carries a semiotic component and, as Tom Betteridge observes, âliterary critics have viewed sodomy as a protean deconstructive category.â10 In the twelfth century, Alain de Lilleâs influential Complaint of Nature presented sexual transgression as a violation of logos in language. Alain describes sodomy as working through grammar itself, so that a homosexual man âis both predicate and subject, he becomes likewise of two declensions, he pushes the laws of grammar too far.â11 The extent, as well as the breadth, of sodomy is evident from Peter Damianâs eleventh-century Book of Gomorrah, which declares: âthis vice cannot in any way be compared to any others, because its enormity supersedes them all.â12 Damian lists four types of sexual vice: solo and mutual masturbation, inter-femural, and anal intercourse. The salient factor is thus not homosexuality but sterility, which is unnatural because the natural telos of sex is reproduction. Damian emphasizes that all four acts count as âsodomyâ because they are âagainst nature⊠whether one pollutes himself or another in any manner whatsoever⊠he is undoubtedly to be convicted of having committed the crime of Sodomâ (78). As St. Thomas Aquinas later confirmed: âWhoever⊠uses copulation for the delight that is in it, not referring the intention to the end which is intended by nature, acts against nature.â13
Damian also locates the sin of sodomy within the mind, when he insists that any failure to âtame manfully the lascivious pimping of lustâ (33) is necessarily sodomitical. Like usury and idolatry, the sin of sodomy is psychological before it is physical. The same is true of idolatry, which is yet more inclusive than either usury or sodomy because it encompasses both of those vices. The first two prohibitions of the Decalogue posit idolatry as the foundational sin, from which all other sins flow. Mankindâs incessant battle against idolatry is the literal topic of the Old Testament and the figurative topic of the New. It is treated by all monotheisms as the archetypal, paradigmatic heresy. Idolatry or shirk is Islamâs most heinous sin (closely followed by riba, or usury, and zina, or sodomy). Monotheistic religion thus concurs with rational philosophy, for idolatry is also the error committed by the prisoners in Platoâs cave. We commit idolatry whenever we worship âthe works of menâs handsâ14âas for instance when we take sense-perception, which is constructed from the categories of the human mind, for the unmediated manifestation of logos.
Like usury and sodomy, in short, idolatry incessantly (and inevitably) recurs throughout postlapsarian history. The struggle against liturgical idolatry produced centuries-long internecine conflicts throughout Christendom, from seventh-century Byzantium to seventeenth-century Massachusetts. Over this long process, however, the meaning of the term âidolatryâ changed. It ceased to designate a universal, ineradicable tendency of fallen humanity, and became instead a set of rituals performed by âidolaters.â In the modern era it became useful to identify these idolaters as the subjugated ânativesâ of the colonized world, and the Catholic Irish provided a convenient paradigm. Like usury and sodomy, idolatry was reifiedâtransformed from a concept into a thingâand thus successfully disguised as a practice exclusive to specific groups of people. Throughout the modern period, usury, sodomy, and idolatry used that disguise as a way of avoiding criticism. Any critique of those vices could easily be made to look like a bigoted attack on the group of human beings with whom they were associated. My main aim in this book is to divert the ethical critique of usury, sodomy, and idolatry away fr...