Erotic politics

Kahn again, using the story of Abraham to discuss the erotic foundations of both family and political order: “The Abraham story . . . tells us that meanings must be borne directly on the body. The covenant requires circumcision . . . . The flesh must bear the idea; it must appear as a text already named. Instead of man naming the products of creation, man himself becomes a name. This particular mark on the flesh is singled out because of its sexual, intergenerational connotations. The very organs of production are marked. Sex is the source of family and politics. They are the same not because the polity must be based on familial relations, but because all products of labor [in both senses!] must bear a divine meaning. What might appear most personal is given significance as a mark of the intertemporal project represented by the covenant. Naked, man still finds himself a representation of the covenant.”

When Abraham responds to God’s call to sacrifice his son with the simple “Here I am,” we have “the founding moment of a political community, and the origin of the intergenerational family. Not the social contract, but the covenant; neither reason nor desire, but faith: without faith, man’s labor will produce nothing that is not undermined by its inevitable return to dust.”

There is so much here: The denial that the body, its wants and desires and urges, is the source of its own meaning; the fact that a meaning is imposed, unchosen, on the bodies of children; the link that Kahn shows between covenant, sex, generations and the political project that is Israel; the “clothing” of the naked man in the covenant, and therefore the utter rejection of a simple public/private division; the overall import that modern politics is foundationally skewed by its efforts to rest social order on reason or desire or will.