The Curse of the Covenant

Abstract

While early anthropologists labored to describe the tribal rites they observed, the first generation of psychoanalysts, most notably, Sigmund Freud, focused on their symbolic significance, specifically the meaning of the ritual of circumcision. Gollaher notes that as a Jew, Freud himself had been circumcised as an infant, although he did not participate in Judaic rituals as an adult. What intrigued him, Gollaher notes, were connections between cutting the penis—as an anatomist he could not consider the foreskin a separate structure—and his evolving theory of sexuality. Especially pertinent here was the relationship—one of “deferred action”—between childhood trauma and later neurosis (Gollaher 2000; Lukacher 1986).

How far can a notion like castration be stretched or resignified before it loses its structural value and epistemological effectivity? (Teresa de Lauretis 1994, 308)

And instead of symbolizing, like the phallus of Dionysus, the generative powers of nature, Christ’s sexual organ—pruned by circumcision in sign of corrupted nature’s correction—is offered to immolation. (Leo Steinberg 1996 [1983], 47)

The theory of interpellation appears to stage a social scene in which a subject is hailed, the subject turns around, and the subject then accepts the terms by which he or she is hailed. (Judith Butler 1997, 106)

The internalization of interpellation is none other than such an (irrational and senseless) act of patching over, of stitching together this chasm. (Rey Chow 2002, 109)