James D. Faubion

Department of Anthropology
Rice University
jdf@rice.edu

 

Are we simply who we choose to be? We know well enough the poles between which answers to this question have tended to oscillate for at least the past century. Determinists of various stripes–biological, psychological, sociological–have insisted that we are not. Decisionists (of whom Sartre, in his more stridently existentialist moments, still occupies the extreme) have insisted that we are. We might review Judith Butler’s peregrinations from Gender Trouble to The Psychic Life of Power in order to remind ourselves just how vexed even the most subtle of efforts to hold something of a middle ground continues to prove to be. Or we might instead ask another question: Do we choose to love? The two questions might even collapse into one another if, as Niklas Luhmann has argued, we most modern of moderns have come to feel love, and to find it, in feeling and finding ourselves validated in the eyes and through the body of another. Both questions direct us to the review of lines of flight and force which, in hindsight, verge on the asymptotic. On the one hand, they direct us to the actuality of our urges and passions, and so to a peculiarly active passivity to which we must recurrently respond. On the other, they direct us to information–to our becoming informed and our coming to be formed–and so to that peculiarly active passivity through which we gradually transform our urges into accountable interests, our passions into discernable sentiments.

 

Aristotle rendered the primal scene of information as a Scene of Instruction in its literal sense: the classroom or gymnasium; the pedagogue, with his repertoire of primers and principles; a student, whose absorption of his lessons would one day be realized in his capacity to exercise what might properly be called self-determination, and so might properly be called choice. Not nearly so anti-Aristotelian as it might seem, Freud’s Primal Scene recasts the pedagogue as father, and the student as lustful, devouring, guilty son. Jacques Derrida has projected the Freudian scene into what Harold Bloom has appropriately deemed the agonistic dynamics of an always already written transcendental Text. Drawing upon Wheeler Robinson’s Inspiration and Revelation in the Old Testament, Bloom’s emendation of Derrida serves as my own point of departure:

 

[I]n his study of Old Testament inspiration, [Robinson] moves towards the trope of a Scene of Instruction when he sees that while oral tradition rose to interpret written Torah, written Torah itself as authority replaced cultic acts. The ultimate cultic act is one in which the worshipper receives God’s condescension, his accommodating gift of his Election-love. Election-love, God’s love for Israel, is the Primal start of a Primal Scene of Instruction, a Scene early displaced from Jewish or Christian into secular and poetic contexts. (51)

 

Bloom points here to two processes, both of which are central to the story of being and love to which I shall shortly turn. The first is that process of reception through which the self comes to acknowledge its being, to inscribe itself as itself, in the light of an “election” which cannot be grasped apart from its interpretation, its reading, of the incorrigible particularity of the experience, and the relation, of love. The second is that process, somewhat too sanguinely deemed “displacement,” through which gnosis–of which the luminous experience of being-in-love is only one example–has come to occupy the epistemic fringes of a tradition increasingly guarded in its acknowledgment of either experiential transcendence or experiential truth.

*Amo Apps, born Amo Bishop, met George Roden first in 1987:

 

I was given a house, 20′ by 20′. Leroy S. gave it to me. I had purchased a hired man’s house from him that had burned out. And I cleaned up the site so beautifully there wasn’t a scrap of tissue paper left. O.K., I figure he gave me a good price so I figured I’d treat him well…. So we went from this burned-out ruin of a house to absolute bare ground. And so he came over to my farm and gave me the companion house, which was sitting next to it, O.K., if I would move it. So I moved the first one by cutting it in half and moving it on a [flatbed]. This was not suitable for a 20′ by 20′ house because the underpinnings required support on the [flatbed], O.K., so meanwhile I knew [a man] who set me up to talk to George Roden, O.K., and as a result of our conversation, I became a Branch Davidian and he moved the house….

 

Somewhere in the middle of moving the house, I realized that we were becoming very emotionally close, and I asked him about his family and discovered that he had a wife, at which point I started backing off. Yeah, it was about the second day of moving the house….

 

So we agreed to study the Bible together, and he suggested that I come up and get water from his well because I require quite a pure drinking water… we were seeing each other a couple of times a week and talking about religion. Eventually, he came up at the farm one afternoon and asked me to marry him. He said he’d divorce his wife. His wife had moved to Israel a year before. He came and he said that he’d called her up and asked her to come home for their thirtieth wedding anniversary, and she refused. And so he came and asked me to marry him. (Interview)¹

 

The Branch Davidians, a millenarian sect established at Mount Carmel, a tract of some seventy-seven acres lying on the outskirts of Waco, Texas, identify the first of their prophets as William Miller, a lay preacher of the Second Great Awakening who became the figurehead of the Adventist movement. After Miller, they point to Ellen White, whose revelatory adjustments of Miller’s predictions of Christ’s return became the doctrinal foundation of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.² After White, they point to Victor Houteff, who brought a band of followers to Texas in the early 1930s after the Seventh-day Adventist Church to which he belonged rejected his vision of the imminent restoration of the kingdom of the Biblical David. After Houteff, they point to Ben and Lois Roden. Ben, who died in 1978, pronounced the name of the awaited Christ to be “Branch,” and decreed the reinstatement of the Davidian ceremonial calendar. Lois had been informed in a vision the year before her husband’s death that the Holy Spirit was a feminine aspect of the Godhead due soon to infuse the earthly orders with the genius of the Final Days. George was Ben and Lois’s son.³

 

His union with Amo proved tumultuous. Well before it was consecrated, George had fallen out with his mother over the issue of succession in the church. After her husband’s death, Lois assumed sole leadership of the church, but George was widely regarded as her heir apparent. By 1983, however, he had become entangled in a battle over authority with a certain Vernon Howell, a sometime rock guitarist and gifted homilist who had arrived at Mount Carmel in 1981 and whom Lois Roden had come to regard as inspired. Indeed, she seems to have found the young man’s appeal more than merely spiritual. George, afflicted with Tourette’s syndrome, apparently expressed his fury in terms that left many other members of the church decidedly chilled. Most would follow Howell, who would rename himself David Koresh, when George drove him from Mount Carmel in 1985. Koresh and his loyalists settled in nearby Palestine. In late 1987, or so the court records have it, George challenged his rival to an ultimate test. He disinterred a corpse from the Mount Carmel graveyard; which one of the two of them was able to revivify it would have the Branch Davidian presidency all to himself. Refusing the gage, Koresh instead approached the sheriff, charging George with corpse abuse. The sheriff demanded proof. Koresh and an armed cohort went to Mount Carmel to procure it. Amo, newlywed, was there when they arrived:

 

George was pig-headed, arrogant and bossy. I was merely stubborn. We had settled down to some fine marital wrangling when David Koresh… fired the first real shot.

 

It was a copy of the claim on church leadership [Howell had] filed in Deed Records.

 

“It doesn’t mean anything,” George dismissed it lightly, “the church law says an executive council can’t appoint a president.” He tossed it onto his desk; I didn’t bother to read it.

 

When I heard the first three audible shots a few days later, I dismissed that lightly, too. I walked to the door of the trailer which was used for community cooking… and looked out. George, definitely a man built for comfort rather than speed, was sprinting. He ran from the front of the Roden house toward a storage shed behind the trailer I was in. I was amazed at how high his knees were pumping.

 

“War games with the visiting Israelites,” I decided, and I went back to cooking dinner. From where I was, I could hear the bullets whine by, about two hundred feet behind me. “Men never grow up,” I reflected. (Cracking the Coverup 1)

 

George was wounded in the exchange. Amo nursed him for three weeks: “So much for the honeymoon” (Cracking the Coverup 1). It was barely a month later that Amo moved away from Mount Carmel and back to her farm. In January, she realized that she was pregnant. For the next several months, she would visit George in jail; responding too vividly to charges resulting from the gunfight, he had been confined for contempt of court. In his absence, the Koreshites returned to the Mount Carmel property, on which they had recently paid some $68,000.00 in overdue taxes. Once freed, George would himself have to live the life of an exile. In September of 1988, at the age of forty-five, Amo gave birth to her second child, a daughter, Zella. In October, George was accused of the murder of a man with whom he had been sharing a room in Odessa, Texas. A court found him innocent by reason of insanity, and relegated him to a psychiatric prison. A brief escape ended with his transfer to a facility of more meticulous security. In the fall of 1998, he seems to have succeeded in breaching even the latter’s walls, but succumbed to an apparent heart attack after only a few moments of recovered freedom.

*At the end of February 1993, agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms arrived en masse at Mount Carmel with a warrant to search for a suspected cache of illegal firearms and explosives. The debacle that unfolded is too well known–still too iconic of governmental intrusiveness and ineptitude–to need recounting. Though she deemed David Koresh an apostate, Amo wept for the innocents who died in the April fire that consumed the Mount Carmel compound. She had been suffering other tribulations as well: homelessness, and the loss of the custody of Zella, who was sent to live with one of her maternal aunts. Believing polygamy Biblically ordained, Amo had contracted other marriages in a disastrous string, but had never rejected George’s surname. In the autumn of 1993, she moved back to Mount Carmel and, though often alone, busied herself with the building of a church office, an informational display, and finally a small museum for the tourists, curiosity-seekers and pilgrims who arrived in a daily stream. On the second anniversary of the fire, a regional militia financed the installation of a memorial to the Mount Carmel dead, the grounds of which Amo would subsequently take it upon herself to tend.

 

At Mount Carmel, in the summer of 1994, we met. For my part, I was the anthropologist that I still am, curious about the look and feel of a place that had–in one of those odd coincidences– first burst into the news when I happened to be putting the final touches on a lecture on millenarianism. I had no idea that I would find so forthcoming and provocative an interlocutor there, much less that I would be at the threshold of a project of research that I have yet to complete. The scene was not quite primal, perhaps, if only because my own hermeneutical consciousness was already too stiff with intellectual condescension to be able to yield fully even to the most gracious condescension of another. Yet, I have learned much from Amo, and not least, much about myself. If neither her chosen one nor her dévoté, I have indeed become her student, and one of her most avid readers, in the larger but also in the stricter sense of the term. For her part, Amo is among other things a writer, and throughout her stay at Mount Carmel, has written voluminously–church history, Biblical exegesis, sermons, autobiography.

 

Neither her writing nor her other activities have, however, proven uniformly compelling, even tolerable, to other members of the church. In the first days of 1997, there was another fire at Mount Carmel; Amo watched all that she had erected burn unceremoniously to the ground. She retreated to her parents’ home in Florida for the duration of the winter, but returned once she heard of the scheduling of a court hearing set to determine the ownership of those prairie acres to which she continued to urge George’s rightful title. The hearing was delayed. In the interim, two schismatic factions of the church have put up their own edifices, one of them where Amo’s once stood. When I last saw her, in June 1998, Amo herself was living in a tiny pup tent at the edge of the road leading into Mount Carmel. She had begun a new assemblage of informational signs, one of them denouncing both of the parties of the schism as impostors. In the aftermath of George’s death, the battle over the property has only grown more heated and the parties even more diverse.

*“Crisis”: from the ancient Greek  (krisis), separating or distinguishing, a decision or judgment, an interpretation, a trial or suit, a dispute, an issue, a turning or sudden change for better or worse. Crisis did not afflict Amo with George. It rather attracted her to him. Her father “an atheist,” her mother “a lukewarm Christian,” she had been raised “a miscellaneous Protestant,” moving seasonally up and down the East Coast from Maine to Florida. After completing a degree at the University of Maine, she fled the tensions of Vietnam-era America for Toronto. She married, gave birth to a son, divorced. In the winter of 1980, seeking refuge from the pace and pollution of the city, she moved with her son to a small farm some ten miles from Waco. In the spring of 1981, she first sensed an invitation to surrender to a purpose beyond her. “It just came over me as I was here in all this beautiful, peaceful country place that I owed God a lot, and I said ‘O.K., God, take the rest of my life.’ Now I didn’t act on that immediately; I just continued kind of doing what I was doing, O.K., and then I felt–you’d have to call it a call to prophecy in the fall of ’83 and the summer of ’84” (Interview).

 

She was not initially prepared for the summons:

 

A systems analyst by profession, I had a dream which caused me to study whether it was in Russia’s best interests to launch a surprise nuclear attack on the United States. The study I prepared showed it to be overwhelmingly in their best interest. Alarmed, I began circulating the study. I suspect that I was reported to the government by my landlord, but that’s just a hunch. The day after I gave him a copy I was under surveillance. My food was poisoned, my house was sprayed with chemicals, people who hid their faces from me started fishing in my landlord’s pond. Alarmed, I told my family. I was ignorant of the Bible; so was my family. In the end-time, God will pour out his Spirit on many people. I know that now, but I didn’t then. I gave my life to God in 1981, but in October 1983, I was still a Sunday Christian, and a backslider. Between the visions and the concern that someone was trying to kill me and my reputation for honesty, I was an easy prey.

 

The deputy sheriff arrived within minutes after my sister and took me to the mental health ward of Providence Hospital. In the morning I was grilled by a psychiatrist…. I spent forty-five minutes denying what I could and explaining the rest. The doctor advised further treatment and I signed an agreement to attend twelve therapy sessions. I was strong-armed by two people to sign a consent to court order, but I wasn’t about to sign. As a result, no court record of this warrantless arrest exists….

 

The persecution started again in June 1984. This time, I didn’t tell anyone. Again my food was poisoned and my house sprayed, and this time, intimidation was added. One of my carving knives was left in the dishwater with its blade broken in half…. It was fine summer weather, but there was little shelter, and the persecutors had a great day…. Airplanes flew over, and when [my son and I] hid under a wet sheet from the hot stuff the water got hot. [My son] saw a man through the sheet throwing something in the water. Mostly I was busy scooping water from the bottom of the pond up around my son…. After awhile the airplane went away and the water cooled down, and I got out and fed [my son] and put him to bed. When I lay down, the sheet under me made my back burn, and I realized that they might come after me to kill me and kill [my son], too. I wasn’t thinking too clearly, but I felt keeping him with me was endangering him, and I was afraid that the hot stuff was radiation. I got him up, sent him into the pond to wash, and went in myself. I didn’t dare put his clothes back on; I didn’t know what was on them. I sent him naked to a neighbor’s house. I didn’t bother with my clothes, either. I sat down on the bridge and waited for the government to finish the job. (Cracking the Coverup 17-19)

 

The sheriff’s deputies would soon pay Amo another visit. They would transport her again to a mental hospital. “I was examined by two people who harassed me to sign forms. When I arrived at [the hospital] I snapped and stated my opinion of the Texas mental health industry in a very loud voice. I was prepared to die rather than spend more time with these fools. One hypodermic wasn’t enough to shut me up once I started; it took two” (Cracking the Coverup 19). In the end, she was accused of child abuse and neglect, and compelled to sign over custody of her son to his father. Without his company, she grew lonely. “I attended six group therapy sessions, said I had a nervous breakdown (true enough, if not the whole truth; I was physically exhausted and suffer from chronic anemia even now as a result of the chemical warfare) and helped other patients with their problems. I suppose the therapists were glad to get rid of me. They released me after the six sessions” (Cracking the Coverup 20).

 

Even a mere two centuries ago, the functionaries of an official regime might still have been able to ask, in all seriousness, whether a woman such as Amo might indeed have been touched by the divine. At present, they have little other alternative but to declare such a woman mad, little other alternative but to place her experiences and her claims under the erasure of a symptomatology. Perhaps we “scholars”–functionaries one and all, at least in our professional capacities–have no other alternative but to join them. Yet it would plainly be wrong to conclude that the idea of God-election has itself uniformly been relegated to the realm of the pathological. It remains an idea central not simply to Orthodox Judaism but also to the ritualism of those pietistic and “charismatic” churches which have proliferated so vigorously in the course of the twentieth century, in the United States and elsewhere, most of whose millions of members even we good functionaries would hesitate to diagnose as insane. Though perhaps revealing a lapsed Weberianism, I am disinclined to conclude even that the gnosis of God-election has been banished to the relatively more benign realms of the “irrational.”⁴ I think that the processes at issue are rather processes of discursive colonization, of the sequestration of those discourses and discursive positions which have lost or surrendered the battle for free circulation and general legitimacy within semiological game preserves where they might continue to gambol in all their exotic splendor. The ghetto might be an even more precise metaphor, an even more precise counter-signature of our modern liberalism. In any case, Weber had already noted by the turn of this century that some part of the “uniqueness of the West” lay in its having subjected religious discourses and their spiritualist carriers to an ever more strict epistemic confinement (“Religious Rejections”). Michel Foucault’s more recent research, and the research of many others as well, has demonstrated that religion was far from dwelling alone in its chambers. Its companions eventually came to include a wide if motley array of other discursive systems, all of which seem to bear the stigma of a common operator, a common function: one that licenses the more or less immediate inference from “internal experience” to one or another determinate state of external affairs.⁵ So, for example, we used to be able to declare ourselves sick when we felt sick, well when we felt well. Physicians no longer permit us such license. (Para’noia) or (paranoi’a) denoted derangement or the losing of one’s wits even in ancient Greek, but seems to have acquired its modern medical profile only in the 1890s.

 

* 

Amo resisted her forced inscription into one of our familiar colonies, but had nowhere else to go but to another, and did go, though her wandering in the wilderness would unfold over several years. The first of her pedagogues–her Virgil–was not George but a woman after whom she would eventually name the daughter she had yet to bear:

 

I went to a Pentecostal church out on Robinson Road–I’m not sure I can remember the name of it; I think it’s called Calvary Assembly of God–and I met a woman there called Zella A., and basically, I was so ignorant. It was in ’81, I guess….

 

She taught me about the Bible some, and she, she just, she took my hand that first day and talked me into going right down and being saved, taking communion there. So she was an influence on me. And then I studied the Bible…. I hadn’t ever read it, and I started heavily studying it. Hard-core Bible study for four years when I met George Roden, and he made a Branch Davidian out of me in an hour, just talking about Houteff’s message. He was preaching Houteff’s message of the Davidian Kingdom, and certainly from everything he said I knew it was Biblically true, Biblically correct. And so I started reading Branch Davidian literature, and studying that. (Interview)

 

With her entry into this secondary Scene of Instruction, Amo was introduced to an illumination of the primacy of the visions with which she had been endowed. She was also introduced to a method, a hermeneutics of reading both text and world, both symbol and self, in which she would, with time and practice, attain the fluency of a virtuoso.

 

The Branch Davidians are not “fundamentalists,” if fundamentalists are those who presume that every proposition in the Bible must be literally true. Their hermeneutics is rather a complex mixture of two distinct proceduralisms, each a complement to the other. One of them, at least as venerable as Philo of Alexandria, is (allêgoria), allegory–a way, as Gerald Bruns has it, of “squaring… an alien conceptual scheme with one’s own on the charitable assumption that there is a sense (which it is the task of interpretation to determine) in which they are coherent with one another” (85). Its mode is consistently figural. In the writings of Victor Houteff and Lois Roden (who was more than a little acquainted with the Talmudic tradition, and a frequent visitor to Israel), as in Amo’s own writings, allegory often unfolds as a gnostic or cabalistic decryption of the hidden significance of the Bible’s roster of personal names and place names. It unfolds further as the translation of stories that seem to be about literal women and men into stories of spiritual forces and spiritual events; of stories that seem to be set on earth into stories set in heaven; of stories that seem to be about the corporal into stories of the regression or progress of the soul.

 

The other proceduralism, perhaps derived from the ancient notion of the (tupôtikos logos), the copy of something once seen, is typology. Already central to the New Testament authors’ approach to the Torah that preceded them, typology proceeds from the axiom of the unity of the Scriptures. It mandates the construal of the men, the women, the places, the individual and collective histories recorded in the Bible as models or exempla of the men, the women, the places, the individual and collective histories of later times.⁶ The former, as types, await their singular or multiple realizations in the antitypes they foreshadow. The relationship that typology posits between the prior and the posterior is thus not precisely one of mimesis, even if Eric Auerbach would have it be so. It is rather one of completion or fulfillment. Rhetorically or poetically, the relationship is metaleptic. The typologist, for his or her part, must discover the present and the future in the past, the world in the text. As rhetor or poet, he or she must execute a synthesis which is also a substitution, and a reduction (Bloom 100-103). The Branch Davidians understand such an act, if well and truly wrought, to require much more than human powers. They understand it to require the inflowing of the Holy Spirit herself.

 

*

 

If Amo has become a vessel of that Spirit, an (aggelos) or messenger of the final truth, she had first to recognize herself as worthy clay, then to reshape herself into a worthier cast than she was. Throughout the exercise, a hermeneutics of text and world also served her as a “hermeneutics of self,” and very much in Foucault’s sense of the term (“Hermeneutics,” “Technologies”). Among many other things, she learned to trace her spiritual potential ultimately to her descent:

 

If you study Abraham and the lineage of Jacob, also known as Israel, you’ll see that God intermarried the same family for three generations. O.K., because Abraham married his half-sister and Isaac married his cousin, and then Jacob married his cousin, O.K.–I’m not quite sure about the degrees of cousinship, but generally they were married into Abraham’s brother’s family, O.K. So that, I think, set the genes for extrasensory perception which certainly is found on my mother’s side of the family, and I believe my mother is descended from the tribe of Dan through her mother’s mother, who was from Denmark. Her mother’s father was also from Denmark; they were immigrants here from Denmark. So, Dan–Lois Roden’s work traces Dan across Europe to Denmark, Scandinavia, Sweden, by their habit of putting “dan,” “den” and “don” in the place names where they stayed, and so there came into England place names like Edinburgh and London. My father’s family, of course, is English. At any rate, I believe that if you read your Bible you see that God spoke directly to Abraham; He spoke directly to Isaac, I think, yep, and He spoke directly to Jacob–Israel. The gift of the ability to hear God, I think, many, many people have, O.K. Abraham’s descendants through Jacob, certainly: they are the people the prophets came from. God simply picks the people, I guess perhaps for attitude. (Interview)

 

George Roden could claim similar descent, but it was not George’s own inspiration to which Amo was drawn:

 

A.R. George’s is a generation that has been bypassed [of] prophetic gifts. I think, in all truth, it’s because he’s not humble enough for God to use him. His parents both heard God. But, if anything, it’s an aggravation to him.
W.R.D. That he doesn’t hear God?
A.R. That he doesn’t hear God and I do. (Interview)

 

Behind the apparent contingency of her desire, behind the seemingly absurd brevity of her bridehood, behind the ostensible excesses of all that she had endured before she had met George, behind all that she would endure after their separation, the allegorist and typologist has come ever more clearly to see a necessary union, a necessary recoupling of a fragmented blessedness. Yet the love story that she has at last been able to tell is itself fragmented, its shreds and patches scattered throughout the several volumes of her prose, as if she were not even yet prepared to confront its full lesson. Once pieced together, it becomes the story of a (hieros gamos), a sacred and permanent marriage of unique generative effect. It is a tragedy embedded within a transcendent comedy, a failed but necessary step toward the ultimate marriage of heaven and earth. It is a revelation of fate, of destiny, and of the cunning of destiny, which is, and can only be, the cunning of God. My editorial compilation of it would go something like this:1 The founding of Zion is prophesied in Isa. 14:29-32. Verse 29: “Rejoice thou not, whole Palestina, because the rod of him that smote thee is broken, for out of the serpent’s root shall come forth a cockatrice, and his fruit shall be a fiery flying serpent.”

 

2 When Moses’ shepherd rod touched the ground, it became a serpent; it was in fact not only a shepherd’s rod, but also a serpent’s rod, because it protected the flock as well as led them.

 

3 As the dove which rested on Christ at his baptism was a symbol of the Holy Spirit at peace, so the serpent raised on a pole by Moses (Num. 21:6-9) to heal snake-bitten sinners, a symbol fulfilled by Christ on the cross (John 3:14), is the symbol of the Holy Spirit at war.

 

4 The serpent’s root must be identified as something basic to the concept of the Holy Spirit, the serpent’s rod.

 

5 This is Lois Roden’s message that the Holy Spirit is in form a woman. The femininity of the Holy Spirit is consistent with the Hebrew texts, but is new to Christian thought.⁷

 

6 David Koresh’s group is represented in this verse as whole Palestina. They left the Branch Davidian property in 1984 and moved to Palestine, Texas because of a conflict with George Roden.

 

7 George is represented twice in this verse: first as the rod that smote Koresh and was broken; then as the cockatrice, the offspring of the serpent’s root.

 

8 George ran off Koresh’s group in 1984. They oppressed him in the courts, shot him in 1987, took the church property in 1988, and probably were involved in sending Dale Adair to kill him in 1989, an incident which resulted in George’s continuing psychiatric confinement (“Seven Seals” 14-15).

 

9 George is not only Lois Roden’s son. This verse also promises (based on the work of Lois Roden) that his daughter is the Holy Daughter, the fourth member of the Holy Family (Rom. 1:20).⁸

 

10 The Holy Daughter, Abimelech, is depicted as a bramble (pomegranate thicket) in the Scriptures that symbolize God as an olive tree, the Holy Spirit as a fig tree, and Christ as a vine (Jud. 9:8- 15) (“Book of Zechariah” 126).

 

11 Jud. 9:14-15 Then said all the trees unto the bramble, Come thou and reign over us. And the bramble said unto the trees, If in truth ye anoint me king over you, then come and put your trust in my shadow: and if not, let fire come out of the bramble and destroy the cedars of Lebanon.

 

12 The Holy Daughter is Zella Amo Bishop Roden, George’s daughter by his contract wife (concubine) from Shechem (U.S.A.; see Jud. 8:31).

 

13 She is God’s judgment on the great men of Shechem, who sent poisoners to persecute her in her yard when she was three years old, in a vain attempt to drive her mother into a psychiatric facility.

 

14 Jud. 9:22-23 When Abimelech [My Father the King] had reigned three years over Israel, then God sent an evil spirit [David Koresh] between Abimelech and the men of Shechem; and the men of Shechem dealt treacherously with Abimelech.

 

15 Zella Amo, who first heard God just before her fourth birthday, is to be the Rod, although intercessors will stand for her while she is a child.

 

16 The Rod is the judge, while the Branch is both king and judge.

 

17 Zech. 11:2 Howl, fir tree; for the cedar is fallen; because the mighty are spoiled: howl, ye oaks of Bashan; for the forest of the vintage has come down.

 

18 The judgment falls on the great men of the earth; they are as vines in the winepress of God’s wrath (Rev. 14:18-20).

 

19 The fir tree is Ephraim, George Roden.

 

20 Jer. 31:18-20 I have surely heard Ephraim bemoaning himself thus: thou hast chastised me, and I was chastised, as a bullock unaccustomed to the yoke: turn thou me, and I shall be turned; for thou art the Lord my God. Surely after that I was turned, I repented, and after that I was instructed, I smote upon my thigh: I was ashamed, yea even confounded, because I did bear the reproach of my youth. Is Ephraim my dear son? For since I spake against him I do earnestly remember him still: therefore my bowels are troubled for him: I will surely have mercy upon him, saith the Lord.

 

21 Eventually, George assumes the role of Jacob (Israel).

 

22 Jud. 17:1-2 And there was a man of Mount Ephraim, whose name was Micah. And he said unto his mother, the eleven hundred shekels of silver that were taken from thee, about which thou cursedest, and spakest of also in mine ears, behold, the silver is with me; I took it. And his mother said, Blessed be thou of the Lord, my son (Babylon is Fallen 92).

 

23 George Roden is Micah. His father was of the tribe of Judah, his mother of Ephraim. He is the literal joining of the two sticks, Judah and Ephraim.

 

24 The eleven hundred shekels of silver represents the eleventh-hour church of V.T. Houteff and Ben Roden.

 

25 Micah’s mother is Lois Roden, who had the spiritual message of the church after Ben Roden died.

 

26 Jud. 17:3-4 And when he had restored the eleven hundred shekels of silver to his mother, his mother said, I had wholly dedicated the silver unto the Lord from my hand for my son, to make a graven image and a molten image: now therefore I will restore it unto thee. Yet he restored the money unto his mother; and his mother took two hundred shekels of silver, and gave them to the founder, who made thereof a graven image and a molten image; and they were in the house of Micah.

 

27 On Ben Roden’s death, George took control of the church from his mother, who had the spiritual message and therefore should have led the church.

 

28 As a result of the struggles over the church, Lois leaves the church with two leaders, both of whom are idols to themselves and their supporters.

 

29 George Roden is the graven image, and David Koresh is the molten image.

 

30 The two hundred shekels is the part of the church that accepted one or the other of them. Most of the church would have neither.

 

31 Hab. 2:9-11 Woe to him that covet an evil covetousness to his house, that he may set his nest on high, that he may be delivered from the power of evil! Thou hast consulted shame to thy house by cutting off many people, and hast sinned against thy soul (“Habakkuk” 3).

 

32 George Roden coveted the leadership of the end-time church which founds the Kingdom of God without rendering obedience to God’s law. In doing so, he set himself both above God and above God’s law.

 

33 He cut off many righteous people from the church, and shamed his parents’ memory, and placed his soul in jeopardy.

 

34 The structural members of God’s temple, the stones and the beams, are symbolic of those who found the Kingdom of God. The stone, the woman God chooses to hold the door of the newborn Kingdom open, shall utter the loud cry. The righteous are called lively stones. The beam of the timbers is a great man or woman; this is the other witness who stands up in judgment.

 

35 The establishment of the witnesses is God’s judgment on George Roden.

 

36 Hab. 2:12-14 Woe to him that buildeth a town with blood, and establisheth a city by iniquity. Behold, is it not of the Lord of hosts that the people shall labour in the very fire, and the people shall weary themself for very vanity? For the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.

 

37 David Koresh built Jerusalem, the city that stands for the Kingdom of God, by theft and lies and bloodshed. God’s judgment burns all of the work of the Koreshites, and after, causes them to weary themselves proclaiming a silly thing, that David Koresh was the second coming of Christ.

 

38 All this so God can show his power once again in fulfilling prophecy, and restore His Bible to an exalted place as a revelation of Himself.

 

39 All the earth is to come to worship God (Isa. 66:23).

 

40 Jud. 17:5-6 And the man Micah had an house of gods, and made an ephos, and teraphim, and consecrated one of his sons, who became his priest. In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes (Babylon is Fallen 92).

 

41 After Lois’ death, the church remained George’s. He chose his son, Joshua, as his successor. Although George behaved as a king, the Kingdom was yet to be established.

 

42 Jer. 6:27 I have set thee for a tower and a fortress among my people, that thou mayest know and try their way.

 

43 Mich. 4:8 And thou, O tower of the flock, the strong hold of the daughter of Zion, unto thee shall it come, even the first dominion; the kingdom shall come to the daughter of Jerusalem.

 

44 The first dominion is the Garden of Eden. My farm, even though choked with briars and thorn trees, is like unto the Garden of Eden in its thirty fruit trees and twenty nut trees, grapes, and berries.

 

45 The fortress is my stronghold on Mount Carmel, where God has founded Zion, the Kingdom of God.

 

46 Jer. 8:6-7 I hearkened and heard, but they spake not aright: no man repented him of his wickedness, saying, What have I done? Every one turned to his course, as the horse rusheth into battle. Yea, the stork in the heaven knoweth her appointed times; and the turtle and the swallow and the crane observe the time of their coming; but my people know not the judgment of the Lord (“The Judgment of the Church” 28).

 

47 In the Mount Carmel tragedy, God founded Zion. Should his church be blind to it?

 

48 Jer. 8:8-9 How do ye say, We are wise, and the law of the Lord is with us? Lo, certainly in vain made he it; the pen of the scribes is in vain. The wise men are ashamed, they are dismayed and taken: lo, they have rejected the word of the Lord; and what wisdom is in them?

 

49 The whole church has rejected Bible truth; all their work is in vain.

 

50 Jer. 8:10-12 Therefore will I give their wives unto others, and their fields to them that shall inherit them: for every one from the least even unto the greatest is given unto covetousness, from the prophet even unto the priest every one dealeth falsely. For they have healed the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there was no peace. Were they ashamed when they had committed abomination? Nay, they were not at all ashamed, neither could they blush: therefore shall they fall down among them that fall; in the time of their visitation they shall be cast down, saith the Lord.

 

51 God threatens the lives of the whole apostate church; everyone would take a blessing that is not his.

 

52 The death decree has fallen on the prominent women of the church because Lois Roden’s work strongly suggests that a woman Holy Spirit messenger will follow her.

 

53 This woman has been persecuted by the government since November, 1991. Meanwhile, the men of the church, who claim to represent the Holy Spirit, publish peace because only the women are persecuted.

 

54 This is an abomination in God’s eyes.

 

55 Jer. 8:13 I will surely consume them, saith the Lord: there shall be no grapes on the vine, nor figs on the fig tree, and the leaf shall fade; and the things that I have given them shall pass away from them (“The Judgment” 29).

 

56 The end-time church will be stripped clean of members because they refused the Kingdom of God.

 

57 Jer. 8:14-15 Why do we sit still? Assemble yourselves and let us enter the defenced cities, and let us be silent there: for the Lord God hath put us to silence, and given us water of gall to drink, because we have sinned against the Lord. We looked for peace, but no good came; and for a time of health, and behold trouble.

 

58 God has rebuked you: How can you expect peace and health in the time of Jacob’s trouble?

 

59 Jer. 8:16 The snorting of his horses was heard from Dan; the whole land trembled at the sound of the neighing of his strong ones; for they are come, and have devoured the land, and all that is in it; the city and those that dwell therein.

 

60 The viper from Dan has frightened the horses to unseat the riders.⁹

 

61 Gen. 49:16-18 Dan shall judge his people as one of the tribes of Israel. Dan shall be a serpent by the way, an adder in the path, that biteth the horses’ heels, so that his rider shall fall backward. I have waited for thy salvation, O Lord.

 

62 These horsemen are they that devoured David Koresh’s church.

 

63 Jer. 8:17 For behold, I will send serpents, cockatrices, among you, which will not be charmed…

 

65 Lois Roden was the serpent’s root; Amo Paul Bishop Roden is the serpent’s branch; Zella Amo Bishop Roden, the fruit of the cockatrice George Roden, is also the serpent’s fruit.

 

66 …and they shall bite you, saith the Lord.

 

67 And we did.

 

* 

Do we choose to be who we are? Do we choose to love? Amo Roden has answered these questions, in her way:

 

Rev. 14:12-13 Here is the patience of the saints: here are they that keep the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus. And I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, write, blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth: yea, saith the spirit, that they may rest from their labours; and their works do follow them.

 

These verses mark the transition from the judgment of the dead to the judgment of the living. Those who die during the judgment of the living, if they die in God, are written in the Book of Life with all their sins blotted out. They are to be born anew in the Kingdom of God without seeing the time of trouble. The rest, like me, have hard work before us. The Kingdom is earned. (Babylon is Fallen 12)

 

Between the blessed, to whom all things will simply be given, and the damned, from whom everything will simply be taken away–there we must locate ourselves, and our inescapable summons to discipline, of the body and of the imagination. The curtains of the Scene of Instruction never altogether close. They open wide in our childhoods; they open again with every new crisis we face. We never really cease being in need of our pedagogues, never really cease being in need of our tools. We are never really complete; and what must be said of ourselves might also be said of all our loves.

 

The Scene of Instruction is thus a scene of irony, and its irony is tragic in tenor. Yet not even Amo Roden seems to have felt it claustrophobic, perhaps because she knows, like Foucault, that the discipline demanded even of her is not an asceticism but rather an ethical (askêsis)–an exercise, a training, a performance, if you will. She knows, too–again, with Foucault, though too many of his readers have failed to notice–that the logic of (askêsis) is plural. It is not merely Austinian, not merely the logic of citation and illocution, which in spite of its many convolutions remains an assertoric logic, in the indicative mood. The Scene of Instruction, after all, is a scene of (poiêsis)–of “creating” or “making.” So, among other things, it is a scene of narration, of composition and recounting, of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, of stories that others tell us about ourselves, of stories intransitively told.¹⁰ With the increasingly dense diffusion of mass media (among them those media which allow for the placing of the Bible in every American hotel and motel room), it has come to be a scene cluttered with narrative “ready-mades.” Yet it is still a scene of reception, and the logic of a reception itself considerably more plural, and more “creative,” than contemporary determinists are inclined to admit, whether their favored mechanism of determination be that of cathexis or of seduction or of indoctrination.

 

Yet in both Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer and Butler’s Psychic Life of Power, Foucault himself has recently reappeared as a determinist in his own right, and the Foucauldean Scene of Instruction rendered either as concentration camp (Agamben 166-180) or as “loss” (Butler 92 and 184-198). Rather bafflingly, Butler fashions her Foucault only from those of his writings preceding the long and momentous interruption between the first and the second volumes of The History of Sexuality. Before that interruption, Foucault labors with, and labors within, the constrictive dynamics of subjection and resistance. After it, he turns to the more expansive dynamics of subjectivation and reflection. Butler turns instead to Althusser and Lacan, and never once either refers or alludes to any of Foucault’s work on ethics and governmentality. Her about-face seems hasty, to say the least. Agamben aspires to be more comprehensive:

 

One of the most persistent features of Foucault’s work is its decisive abandonment of the traditional approach to the problem of power, which is based on juridico-institutional models… in favor of an unprejudiced analysis of the concrete ways in which power penetrates subjects’ very bodies and forms of life…. [I]n his final years Foucault seemed to orient this analysis according to two distinct directives for research: on the one hand, the study of the political techniques (such as the science of the police) with which the State assumes and integrates the care of the natural life of individuals into its very center; on the other hand, the examination of the technologies of the self by which processes of subjectivation bring the individual to bind himself to his own identity and consciousness and, at the same time, to an external power. (5; translation slightly modified)

 

Yet even this summation casts the later Foucault too much in the mold of his earlier incarnation. Indeed, were Agamben’s terminology accepted as an entirely general, an unexceptionable construal of Foucault’s analytics of governmentality, ethics would effectively be under erasure; as the “considered [réfléchie] practice of freedom,” (Foucault, “Ethics” 284) it would effectively dissolve, under an oddly Hegelian compression of self-formation into transcendent surrender.¹¹ Not that such an outcome should be regarded as a historical impossibility: one of the most compelling aspects of Foucault’s treatment of political techniques and technologies of the self is that it never takes the ethical for granted. It acknowledges the considered practice of freedom as a human possibility. It does not, however, perpetrate the error of presuming that the actualization of such a possibility is always historically given. For Foucault, ethical practice requires not simply a repertoire of technologies but also an “open territory,” a social terrain in which a considered freedom might actually be exercised. In ancient Greece, that terrain was largely the province of citizen males; women and slaves had little if any access to it. In the panoptic apparatus, it retracts to a virtual vanishing point. Even in our modern “liberal” polities, the most prominent Foucauldean locales of the contemporary possibility of ethical practice, it is far from being a true commons. It is by no means “post-colonial.”

 

What is at stake here is in any case far more than the best, the most accurate, the most just reading of Foucault. Nor is the matter simply one of conflicting interpretations–Butler’s vs. Agamben’s vs. Foucault’s–of the condition of the (Western) subject at (its Western) present. It is rather one of method, and warrant, and perhaps of interpretive self-inscription as well. Both Butler and Agamben are proud speculators, and they seek a speculative, a theoretical Foucault, a dictator of universal pronouncements. For the former, the Foucault of Discipline and Punish and “The Will to Know” is not merely a diagnostician of particular disciplinary and biopolitical regimes, but a theoretician of subjectivation as such, a theoretician in need of a Freudian concept of ambivalence in order to render his thought complete.¹² For the latter, Foucault is the revelator of the universality of biopolitics, but a revelator who has failed to make plain enough that the biopolitical executor’s “power over life” is the universal correlate of sovereignty itself (46-52 and 121-153). Both Butler and Agamben may be right (one can at least speculate). Yet both appropriate Foucault’s authority in asserting one or another “anthropological unity”–the ambivalent subject, the “bare life” of sovereignty¹³–for which Foucault’s method has no place. For Foucault, the human as an anthropological unity, if it is a unity, can only be a historical unity; and as a historical unity, can only be defined or known at history’s end–which is to say, not yet, and perhaps not ever.¹⁴

 

What Foucault would say of the human he would also say of power. So we must not follow Agamben or Butler in reducing Foucault’s conception of power either to political management or to psychosocial bondage. We must settle for a few “systematic” connections: exploitation, domination, and subjection (which is precisely subjectivation at its ethical vanishing point) are the Foucauldean limits of the ethical; power relations–these mobile, malleable, and fluid asymmetries of force and influence which charge even the most egalitarian of interactions–are its proper social matrix, and there is nothing to indicate a priori what structure even they might assume (“Ethics” 296). Nor should we reduce even subjectivation to a final, much less, an efficient cause of any ethical project. Foucault identifies four parameters of the ethical field (neither necessarily universal nor necessarily exhaustive): the substance to which ethical concern attends; the mode of subjectivation within which, or oriented to which, ethical judgment takes shape; the work required to become an ethical subject of a particular sort; and the end which such a subject, fully formed, would constitute (History of Sexuality 26-28). On the one hand, no ethical project is altogether free. Or as Foucault puts it:

 

if I am… interested in how the subject actively constitutes itself in an active fashion through practices of the self, these practices are nevertheless not something invented by the individual himself. They are models which he finds in his culture and which are proposed, suggested, imposed upon him by his culture, his society, and his social group. (“Ethics” 291; translation slightly modified)

 

On the other hand, here as elsewhere, Foucault alludes to multiple hiatus: between proposal and commitment, between suggestion and intention. Neither culture nor society nor the social group thus stands, always and everywhere, as an insuperable boundary, either to the ethical imagination or to ethical practice. Here, I think, is where the analytical provocation of Foucault’s analytics of ethics lie. It forsakes subjectivism, but also forsakes that easy relativism which has grown so familiar, and so long in the tooth. The alternative it offers begins to emerge clearly only in the second volume of The History of Sexuality,under the regulative idea of “problematization,” a process through which and in which thought reveals its specific difference:

 

What distinguishes thought is that it is something quite different from the set of representations that underlies a certain behavior; it is also something quite different from the domain of attitudes that can determine this behavior. Thought is not what inhabits a certain conduct and gives it its meaning; rather, it is what allows one to step back from this way of acting or reacting, to present it to oneself as an object of thought and to question it as to its meaning, its conditions, and its goals. Thought is freedom in relation to what does, the motion by which one detaches oneself from it, establishes it as an object, and reflects on it as a problem. (“Polemics” 117)

 

Problematization is not only an ethical process, not a possibility for ethical thought alone; it is as broad as thought itself. Yet it is problematization that provides the thematic bridge between a historically specific genealogy of ethics and the general ethical status of what I have been deeming “crisis.” Problematization also provides the bridge between the passionate imagination of a millenarian prophetess and Foucault’s rearticulation and expansion of what Aristotle had delimited as the scope of ethical activity as such.

 

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle aims at codifying the abstract guidelines of that “master-craft” () (arkhitektonikê) which is “politics” ( ) (hê politikê) (Ii4), and which has as its end that unique object which is sought always for its own sake, and never for the sake of anything else (Ivii1). The object of politics must thus be an “activity” () (energeia), since it is evident that only among the class of activities, rather than the class of latent capacities or that of passive states, that one might locate an object perfect or complete enough to be sufficient for us, in and of itself. It is not until the sixth book of the Ethics that Aristotle argues explicitly that such an object must also be a “practice” () (praxis), and never a “creating” or “making” () (poiêsis). At issue in that book are the intellectual virtues, and especially the cardinal intellectual virtue of the ethical actor–“practical wisdom” () (phronêsis), skill at deliberation. Assessing its genus, Aristotle concludes that practical wisdom cannot be a science, for it deals with the variable, not the fixed and determinate. “Nor,” he continues, “can it be the same as ‘art’ () (tekhnê)… [and] not art, because practicing and making are different in kind. The end of making is distinct from it; the end of practice is not: practicing well is itself the end” ( … … ) (ouk an eiê hê phronêsis… tekhnê… d’hoti allo to genos praxeôs kai poiêseôs; tês men gar poiêseôs heteron to telos; tês de praxeôs ouk an eiê; esti gar autê hê eupraxia telos) (VIv3-4). Shortly before this, he will have declared that “all art deals with bringing something into existence; and to pursue an art means to study how to bring into existence a thing which may either exist or not exist, and the efficient cause ( ) (hê arkhê) of which lies in the maker and not the thing made (VIiv4; translation modified, emphasis added).

 

These distinctions have a number of striking implications. One of them amounts to a rejection of the Socratic analogy between ethical and “technical” virtuosity. Another, more startling (if no less trenchant), is that politics–qua politics, in any case–is itself not yet an ethical but rather a technical enterprise, though one that aims at bringing ethical practice into existence. The same must be said of those various activities to which Foucault refers as “practices of the self” or “techniques of the self” or “technologies of the self.” Hence, they fall into a realm of activity that Aristotle conceives as prior to, or as not yet involving, “choice” () (proairesis). Or perhaps not even that much can be said. Aristotle may instead have no room, ethical or “pre-ethical,” for Foucault’s practices and techniques and technologies of the self. Taking him strictly at his word, he at least has no room for them in the realm of “art,” for all that is art manifests a causal fissure between maker and things made. It would perhaps be too hasty thus to accuse The Philosopher of being paradoxical, but not, I think, too hasty to accuse him of being neglectful. For Aristotle, the “middle voice” of reflexive activity, of an agency in which the self is at once subject and object, doer and that to which something is done, has no poetic pitch.¹⁵

 

Foucault restores its pitch, and restores much of the genuine complexity of ethical pedagogy in doing so. He is not the first: one might look back to Nietzsche, or to Rousseau, or to Montaigne. Matters of originality aside, though, such moderns (and near-moderns) must, I think, be deemed to have won at least this stage or moment of their debate with the ancients; the middle should not indeed be excluded from ethics. Or more fairly, we might judge the whole matter something of a red herring. Foucault has himself shown, after all, that practices and technologies of the self were altogether as integral to the ethical life of the ancient world as they were to its Christian successor. Yet we must still give Aristotle his due. If he did not adequately discern the importance, or even the possibility, of ethical self-reflexion, he must still be given credit for discerning, or reiterating (see NEVIiv2: once again, matters of originality are irrelevant), the depth of the divide between making and doing, between creation and choice. It is regrettable that so few moderns have preserved this bit of his broader wisdom. Having discarded it, too many modern philosophers of the self find themselves oscillating uncomfortably between two equally unacceptable poles: one which would place both creation and choice under the transcendental influence of a quasi-demonic psyche (or culture, or society); and another, which would release both into the Elysian expanses of sheer contingency. Hence, I would suggest, the decidedly modern quarrel between “primordialists” and “constructivists” with which such theorists as Butler continue to engage themselves. That antagonists on both sides of this quarrel have claimed Foucault as an ally is, I think, indicative less of his ambiguity than of his belonging no more to one side than to the other. With Aristotle, he sees in choice or (poiêsis) an activity neither passively determined nor deliberately willed. Or to put it more positively: for Aristotle as for Foucault, (poiêsis) is an activity in which the peculiar dynamics of thought interposes itself between reaction and action. For Foucault, the indeterminate house of mirrors, and words, and sticks, and stones that thus permits of access is the house of the self in ethical formation.

 

* 

The house in which Amo Roden is living is perhaps cramped, and its neighbors largely unfriendly. Yet it still stands, however much it might now be in danger of toppling. Within it, choice continues, and with it, a discipline at least potentially liberated from the drudgeries of either repetition or parody. The logic of poetic discipline is the logic of trope, a logic that Aristotle once again was the first to elucidate, even if he did not fully recognize its practical import. The poet does not cite: she alludes and refigures. The poet does not yet “do” anything. Her logic is modal, and its mood is not indicative, but subjunctive. As Amo Roden might well agree, it concerns not the actual, but the possible. Choice is not its point of departure, but instead its horizon.

 

Notes

 

1. My regular companion during my visits to Mount Carmel, William R. Dull, has compiled an extensive photographic documentary as a complement to my own research. A small sample of his work appears in my “Deus Absconditus: Conspiracy (Theory), Millennialism, and (the End of) the Twentieth Century.” On one occasion, in October 1995, he conducted an interview with Ms. Roden on my behalf. I cite that interview here, and throughout. I hold the text of the interview, as of the other interviews and texts from which I have derived Ms. Roden’s thought, in a personal archive. Ms. Roden has insisted that I use her actual name when writing about her. I have also used the actual names of those in her circle (her husband, for example) who have become public figures over the past several years. Otherwise, I have sought to preserve at least a modicum of anonymity.

 

2. On Ellen White, see e.g. Ronald L. Numbers, Prophetess of Health. On Miller and Adventism, see e.g. Ruth Alden Doan, The Miller Heresy, Millennialism, and American Culture; Edwin S. Gaustad, ed., The Rise of Adventism; and Gary Land, ed., Adventism in America: A History.

 

3. On Houteff and the Rodens, see James D. Tabor and Eugene V. Gallagher, Why Waco? (33-43).

 

4. Weber’s most mature commentaries on the relegation of transcendental commitments to the “irrational” realm emerge in “Science as a Vocation.”

 

5. The theme is already present in Foucault’s earliest monographs. See Madness and Civilization and The Birth of the Clinic.

 

6. On the typological hermeneutics of the New Testament authors, see Leonhard Goppelt, Typos, and G.H.W. Lampe, “The Reasonableness of Typology” (18-22).

 

7. New, perhaps, only in its letter. The feminization of aspects of the Godhead in fact has long-standing precedents, Gnostic and Protestant alike. It is a notable aspect of the Shakerite theology of Mother Ann Lee. See Lawrence Foster’s “Had Prophecy Failed?” (176-177).

 

8. “The Seven Seals” (15). The citation of Romans 1:20 may be unintended; its relevance to Ms. Roden’s claim here is unclear.

 

9. “The Judgment” 29. Ms. Roden appends a footnote: “That which is crushed breaketh out into a viper (Isa. 59:5).”

 

10. This is an anthropological point, which Clifford Geertz has made with particular eloquence in “Deep Play.” It is also much of the point of Foucault’s enduring interest in autobiographical, diaristic, and epistolary writing, from the “confessions” of Pierre Rivière and Herculine Barbin to the intimate exchanges between Marcus Aurelius and Cornelius Fronto.

 

11. It would indeed seem that there is no room left for the ethical in Agamben’s version of modernity.

 

12. Of the argument of Discipline and Punish, Butler writes: “Although Foucault is specifying the subjectivation of the prisoner here, he appears also to be privileging the metaphor of the prisoner to theorize the subjectivation of the body” (Psychic Life 85; emphasis added). On ambivalence, the metaphor she herself favors, see the same work (173-75 and 193-98). It should further be noted that Butler appears to see no distinction between discipline and biopower.

 

13. “Bare life” glosses the Greek (zôê), “life” as distinct from the distinctly human capacity to construct and pursue a (bios) or “way of life.” Agamben (2-8) borrows the dichotomy from Aristotle’s Politics.

 

14. On Foucault’s method and its epistemological implications, see my “Introduction” (xxv-xxix).

 

15. On the middle voice, cf. Stephen Tyler, “Them Others–Voices Without Mirrors.”

 

Works Cited

 

• Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998.
• Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. H. Rackham. Loeb Classical Library. Rev. ed. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1934.
• Auerbach, Eric. Mimesis: The Represenatation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans. W. R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1953.
• Bloom, Harold. A Map of Misreading. New York: Oxford UP, 1975.
• Bruns, Gerald L. Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern. New Haven: Yale UP, 1992.
• Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.
• —. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997.
• Doan, Ruth Alden. The Miller Heresy, Millennialism, and American Culture. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1987.
• Faubion, James D. “Deus Absconditus: Conspiracy (Theory), Millennialism, and (the End of) the Twentieth Century.” Paranoia Within Reason: A Casebook on Conspiracy as Explanation. Late Editions 6. Ed. George E. Marcus. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. 375-404.
• —. Introduction. Essential Works of Michel Foucault Vol. 2: Aesthetics, Method, Epistemology. By Michel Foucault. Ed. James D. Faubion. Series ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: The New Press, 1998. xiii-xliii.
• Foster, Lawrence. “Had Prophecy Failed? Contrasting Perspectives of the Millerites and Shakers.” The Disappointed: Millerism and Millenarianism in the Nineteenth Century. Eds. Ronald L. Numbers and Jonathon M. Butler. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987. 173-88.
• Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon, 1973.
• —. “The Ethics of Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom.” Rabinow 281-301.
• —. “The Hermeneutic of the Subject.” Rabinow 93-106.
• —. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon, 1985.
• —. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Pantheon, 1965.
• —. “Polemics, Politics, Problematizations: An Interview with Michel Foucault.” Rabinow 109-19.
• —. “Technologies of the Self.” Rabinow 223-51.
• Gaustad, Edwin S., ed. The Rise of Adventism: Religion and Society in Mid-Nineteenth Century America. New York: Harper and Row, 1974.
• Geertz, Clifford. “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.” The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973. 412-53.
• Gerth, Hans, and C. Wright Mills, eds. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. New York: Oxford UP, 1946.
• Goppelt, Leonhard. Typos: The Typological Interpretation of the Old Testament in the New. Trans. Donald H. Madvig. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1982.
• Lampe, G. H. W. “The Reasonableness of Typology.” Essays on Typology. Comp. G. H. W. Lampe and K. J. Woollcombe. Chatham. Studies in Biblical Theology 22. London: SCM Press, 1957. 9-38.
• Land, Gary, ed. Adventism in America: A History. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1986.
• Numbers, Ronald L. Prophetess of Health: Ellen G. White and the Origins of Seventh-day Adventist Health Reform. Rev. ed. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1992.
• Rabinow, Paul, ed. Essential Works of Michel Foucault. Vol. 1: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. New York: The New Press, 1997.
• Robinson, H. Wheeler. Inspiration and Revelation in The Old Testament. Oxford: Clarendon, 1946.
• Roden, Amo Paul Bishop. Babylon is Fallen. Ms. JDF’s archive.
• —. “The Book of Zechariah.” Ms. JDF’s archive.
• —. Cracking the Coverup. Ms. JDF’s archive.
• —. “Habakkuk: Judgment.” Ms. JDF’s archive.
• —. “The Judgment of the Church.” Ms. JDF’s archive.
• —. Interview with William R. Dull. JDF’s archive. October 1995.
• —. “The Seven Seals.” Ms. JDF’s archive.
• Tabor, James D., and Eugene V. Gallagher. Why Waco? Cults and the Battle for Religious Freedom in America. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995.
• Tyler, Stephen. “Them Others–Voices Without Mirrors.” Paideuma 44 (1998): 31-50.
• Weber, Max. “Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions.” Gerth and Mills 323-59.
• —. “Science as a Vocation.” From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Gerth and Mills 129-56.