George Aichele

Dept. of Philosophy and Religion, Adrian College
470-5237@mcimail.com

The Theology of the Text

 

[T]here will never be . . . any theology of the Text.

 

(Derrida, Dissemination 258)

 

If the text is an instance of what Jacques Derrida calls “differance,” the ineffable writing, then there can be no theology of the text. There can be no theology of the text because the text is the trace which escapes onto- theological closure (closure of the “volume,” of the “work”) even as it inscribes it. As the non-identity or non- presence which lies at the heart of any scriptural identity, the text is no more than the entirely material “stuff” (hyle) which the idealism inherent in the traditional understanding of the text does not comprehend and therefore excludes.

 

This understanding of what a text is differs greatly from the traditional one. The traditional understanding of the text allows us to speak of two readers reading “the same text” (book, story, poem, etc.) even though not only the physical objects of the reading but the editions and even the translations involved are different. It allows us to agree or disagree about the legitimacy of an interpretation, the authority of an edition, or the accuracy of a translation. The invisible, underlying stratum which allows us to posit the identity of texts is their meaning, the spiritual essence which binds many varying physical copies into unity.

 

The traditional understanding of the text is therefore profoundly theological; it is that very theology of the text which differance refuses. It is also profoundly logocentric. For this understanding, the text is not the concrete, unique ink-and-paper thing which you might hold in your hand, scan with your eyes, file on a shelf, give away, or even throw in the trash.¹ Instead, the text is an ideal, spiritual substance, a Platonic form of which the material thing is merely a “copy.” The physical object is simply the medium, the channel in and through which the spiritual reality has become incarnate. This way of thinking seems quite natural to us; this indicates how deeply ingrained the theology involved here actually is.

 

Corresponding closely to the theology of the text is a complex economy of the text, which allows texts to be owned in three distinct but interrelated ways. The conspiracy between these three types of ownership forms the traditional understanding of the text. Meaning is at the center of this system of values; what defines each of the three types of ownership, and their relations to one another, is the desire for meaning. These three types of ownership together establish a law of the text, a system which authenticates “my property” and delimits my rights and obligations in relation to the text. The law of the text establishes the legitimacy of meaning, the possibility of a proper reading. It is the law of what Roland Barthes calls the readerly.

 

The first owner, the reader, normally owns one copy of the text, a physical object, the book. The reader desires but has no guarantee of owning the book’s meaning. The second owner, the author, is the book’s origin and therefore owns its meaning–the true meaning reflected in every copy. The author secures the book’s meaning. There is also a third “owner,” the copyright holder, who may also be the author (or the reader). This owner possesses the legal right to disseminate copies, to control the event of incarnation. Each of these owners may say, “This is my book,” but the term “my book” cannot mean the same thing in each of these three cases.

 

This economy of triple ownership turns the text into a “work.”² For Barthes, the work is defined by society’s recognition of an author and thus of an authority: “One must realize that today it is the work’s ‘quality’ … and not the actual process of reading that can establish differences between books” (“From Work to Text” 79). The work is meaningful and complete; it is an object of consumption. All three owners require the work to be a union of spirit and matter–a union which can (and must) be undone. For the theology of the text, meaning is “in” the text; it is a property of the text.

 

The theology of the text requires that a distinction be made between exegesis and eisegesis. Exegesis draws (or leads) the truth out of the text; eisegesis imposes the reader’s beliefs upon or reads them into the text. No confusion is permitted between these two. It is an ethical distinction: exegesis respects the integrity of the text, and eisegesis does not. Metaphysics is also involved: the text contains a truth within it, which the skillful reader can extract more or less undamaged, and without imposing too many of her own preconceptions upon it. The text is in some way connected to reality–a reality which is outside of the text (extratextual)–and it is this reality which grounds the proper meaning of the text, inside of the text.

 

Of course, the theology of the text recognizes that no reading is entirely free of preconceptions, no matter how objective or unbiased the reader may be. Your readings are inevitably shaped by who you are, your previous experiences, feelings and beliefs, and your current contexts, desires, and expectations. Crossing the gap between receiver and sender of any message requires a tricky and sometimes dangerous journey. The traditional understanding of the text assures us that there are guarantees which lessen the difficulties and overcome the dangers in transmission of meaning. These guarantees are provided by rigorous critical techniques, often historical, but also psychological, sociological, or literary. Within the text itself there hides an accessible meaning, which one technique or another can uncover. These techniques provide ways to bridge the gap between text and reality, to capture meaning and thereby close the circle of understanding. Completely objective analysis is impossible, but with proper use of the techniques something approaching a scientific consensus can be reached.

 

However, the theologically indispensable distinction between exegesis and eisegesis has been eroded in recent years. First the New Criticism, then structuralism, and most recently the various forms of poststructuralism (including the views of Derrida, Barthes, and Michel Foucault) have with increasing vigor exposed and challenged theological presuppositions on which the traditional understanding of the text rests. The notion that each text contains within it a single true meaning–or any meaning– has been abandoned by many, and the question of reference– the connection between text and reality–is up for grabs. The Eurocentric and phallocentric tendencies of the supposedly scientific criticism are increasingly difficult to deny, although defenders of the Western cultural tradition (the “great books”) remain plentiful, and the debate is probably far from over.

 

There will never be any theology of the text, says Derrida. However, if we must do without a theology of the text, then perhaps a theology of reading can in some respects take its place. The question of the object of our reading becomes uncertain and even mysterious, but the question of what reading is can be at least partly answered. In our belief that there is a connection between the text and reality, we have overlooked or minimized theologically important dimensions of reading, including the role of the reader in the production of meaning, the influence of ideology upon reading, and the resistance to meaning inherent within texts.³ As the concept of “text” becomes problematic and elusive for postmodern thought, an understanding of reading becomes more desirable. We can no longer rely upon a theology of the text, but we can explore a theology of reading.

 

The Non-Reader

 

Reading is an endless and violent playing with the text, and the reader is in a perpetual struggle with the law of the text. She draws her life from this law even as she disturbs it; she is a vector directing the movement of the law and giving it meaning. The law establishes the book as a meaning-filled work, as the product of a worker (an author) within a system of exchange which makes it available as a piece of property. Nevertheless the reader determines the value of the book, as a work, for all of its various owners.

 

In Italo Calvino’s postmodern novel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, there is a character named Irnerio. Irnerio is a “non-reader”–a person who has taught himself how not to read. He is not illiterate, not even “functionally illiterate.” Irnerio refuses to read. Yet Irnerio does not refuse to look at written words. Rather, he has learned how to see strange and meaningless ink marks on pages where others see words. Irnerio is beyond reading; for him the books, pages, and words are no longer the transparent vehicles for immaterial ideas, but they are solid, opaque objects.

 

I've become so accustomed to not reading that I don't even read what appears before my eyes. It's not easy: they teach us to read as children, and for the rest of our lives we remain the slaves of all the written stuff they fling in front of us. . . . The secret is not refusing to look at the written words. On the contrary, you must look at them, intensely, until they disappear.(49)

 

For the non-reader, the written words eventually “disappear”–they disintegrate into not-quite-letters, shapes, blobs of darkness on the white page. This is because the non-reader looks at them, at the physical marks themselves, and not at what they mean. The words disappear into sheer materiality; they become meaningless deposits of ink on paper. They are not altered physically, but they lose their signifying potential. They cease to be filled with what the philosopher Gottlob Frege called “sense”; they become nonsensical. The printed words return to what Julia Kristeva calls the semiotic chora. To speak of such texts as more-or-less accurate copies of an ideal, transcendent original is impossible.

 

The words also disappear for readers, but for the opposite reason, and in the opposite direction. As you learned to read, the meaning of the words gradually came to dominate the physical text. You learned to conceptualize past or through the concrete marks that make up words and sentences, to “see” meanings or ideas that are represented, to hear the language with your mind’s ear. As reading became easier for you, the materiality of writing (as an obstruction to sense) became an almost invisible, transparent vehicle; what you really read is what the written words “say,” their meaning. You only read words insofar as writing itself has become invisible. What you read is the idea within the word, and you don’t like it if the materiality of the word obscures the idea.

 

Thus the written word may disappear in either of two directions, which correspond to the two components that make up language–the physical medium (the signifier) and the intelligible content (the signified). For the reader, the word is caught in a tension between these two components–a tension which cannot be maintained, but only imagined as a midpoint between two extremes. When either of the differences which make signification possible–differences between signifiers, or differences between signifieds–are foregrounded (when they become visible), the word disappears. For those who know how to read–and this includes non-readers such as Irnerio–one component or the other must be foregrounded. Unlike Irnerio, readers choose to foreground the signified: the concepts, feelings, and other representations derived from reading. To foreground the material signifier of writing rather than its signified meaning, as Irnerio does, seems ludicrous and irresponsible to us–it goes against the grain; it is unnatural.

 

Non-reading stays close to the physical letter, the written word. This would correspond to Barthes’s “text of bliss,” the writerly text. A reader can become a non-reader only through a deliberate choice; such a choice reflects upon, and rejects, the ethics (and economics, and theology) of the text. Irnerio refuses the categories of ownership, at least when it comes to books. If he were not such an agreeable fellow, and actually quite moral in his own strange way, you would have to think of Irnerio as evil. Yet readers are also non-readers, although in a limited way. When you attempt to decipher an unusual script, or study a language with a different alphabet, the foregrounding of the signifier is unavoidable, and often unpleasant. You then become an inadvertent non-reader, although unlike Irnerio you are still trying to read.

 

However, no one can actually learn not to read. Irnerio represents an unreachable goal; that is why his subversions of literariness do not upset us. Instead, they amuse us. Not to read is an impossible ideal, for the unconscious habits of reading cannot be entirely unlearned. The non-reader rejects the signified, and chooses only the signifier. However, a signifier without a signified is impossible; hence the non-reader is impossible. Probably only the truly illiterate person–the one who can make nothing out of writing–can actually see the written word as a bunch of squiggles, senseless marks which cannot be significantly distinguished from other similar squiggles. Such squiggles are not signifiers, and they have no signifieds.

 

For Irnerio all that counts is the life lived instant by instant; art for him counts as expenditure of vital energy, not as a work that remains, not as that accumulation of life that [the reader] seeks in books. But he also recognizes, without need of reading, that energy somehow accumulated, and he feels obliged to bring it back into circulation, using [the reader's] books as the material base for works in which he can invest his own energy, at least for an instant.(150)

 

Irnerio views books merely as things. He is an artist, and literature is his medium, but not as we might expect. Books are worthy in and of themselves, but only as the meaningless stuff (hyle) which he glues together into larger hunks and then carves into abstract sculptures. However, non-reading is not easy, even for a master such as Irnerio. How does he decide which book is the right one for a sculpture? Is his decision based solely on the physical matter of the book (color or shape of cover, size or thickness of pages, binding, typeface, etc.), or is Irnerio also somehow aware of its contents?

 

I fix the books with mastic, and they stay as they were. Shut, or open, or else I give them forms, I carve them, I make holes in them.. . . . The critics say what I do is important. Now they’re putting all my works in a book. . . . A book with photographs of all my works. When this book is printed, I’ll use it for another work, lots of works.

. . . . There are some books that immediately give me the idea of what I can make from them, but others don't. Sometimes I have an idea, but I can't make it until I find the right book.(149)

 

Non-reading points to the limit-condition which defines reading: its material situation. It highlights the theology implicit in the traditional understanding of the text. Yet the non-reader is clearly a sort of parasite on the literate world, or indeed, on literature itself. Irnerio cannot exist unless readers exist, unless an entire immense structure of civilization exists–including authors and publishing houses and scholars and bookstores and translators, as well as economic and educational and political systems–a structure which allows and requires readers to be readers. The ramifications of that larger structure provide the world and much of the plot of Calvino’s novel.

 

Literal Translation

 

The reader is made possible by the misplacing of the word which is writing. Every reading is a translation, a transfer (or “metaphor”) of something which allegedly lies on or in the page–Frege’s “sense”–to some other place inside the reader’s mind. Yet as Irnerio makes clear, when he refuses to read, that “something” is not the physical stuff of the books themselves, but something else entirely. Readers are trans-lators, those who take things from their proper places and move them somewhere else, and reading is intertextual, an endless juxtaposition and interchange of texts which is a kind of translation. The theology of reading entails also a theory of translation, and vice versa.

 

For the theology of the text, the goal of the translator is to retrieve the authentic message of the original text and then re-embody that message in a new text. It is only the ideal text, the “work,” which can be translated, not the material text. Translation is exegesis. Compared to its meaning, the physical aspects of the translated text are unimportant, and they can be modified and rearranged and ultimately sloughed off, like a mortal human body temporarily inhabited by an eternal soul. As noted above, the theology of the text has its own doctrine of the incarnation, for which the spiritual “word” enters into the written “flesh.”

 

The translation theory of Walter Benjamin presents an alternative view of the theological dimension of texts and the operations of language–a view that is close to Irnerio’s. According to Benjamin, the goal of translation is not to transfer a meaning (which can somehow be detached from its linguistic embodiment) from one textual body to another, but rather to form a kind of reciprocity between the translation and the original text, so that the reader sees through both to “pure language.” This pure or “true” language is not an historical, empirical language, but rather it is language itself, language without purpose, meaning, or function–language speaking only itself, endlessly. Benjamin called this goal “literal translation.”

 

A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully.(79)

 

Literal translation seeks “a language completely devoid of any kind of meaning function . . . pure signifier . . . paradoxical in the extreme” (de Man 96-97). The goal of literal translation is the interlinear text, “in which literalness and freedom are united” (Benjamin 82). In the space between the parallel lines of the two texts, the translation and its original are united in a true language “without the mediation of meaning.” The translation reflects back upon and reveals the original as a fragment of pure language, in a way that it is unable to reveal itself. In translation the original is brought back to life, and the pure language imprisoned within the original text is “liberated” (Benjamin 71-72, 80). It is translation, according to Benjamin, that “saves” the text.

 

For Benjamin, the principal question in translation theory is: how does the translated text illuminate the original text? The value of a translation lies in its confrontation with the original text, not in its infallible transmission of the meaning of that text. The preferred translation will not necessarily be the most accurate one, the clearest transmission of meaning, but rather the one which stands in tension with the original text. Literal translation measures the uniqueness of the material text by the other texts with which it is juxtaposed, and with the possibilities for intertextual meaning which then emerge. Like a tangent to a circle, the translation harmoniously supplements and complements the original. There is no question of the two texts somehow being two copies of the same thing.

 

The interlinear space of translation is utopian and uninhabitable; it is sacred and untouchable space (Derrida, The Ear of the Other 115). The letters of the alphabet, from which the text is assembled, are meaningless in themselves. The text itself as a physical object, the material space of the semiotic, is deficient in meaning. The physical text is a literal text, and therefore it resists interpretation. It is unreadable, non-readable, non-readerly. According to this view, the purpose of language is not to reveal but to conceal, and translation tests the power of language to hide meaning:

 

[T]ranslation must in large measure refrain from wanting to communicate something, from rendering the sense, and in this the original is important to it only insofar as it has already relieved the translator and his translation of the effort of assembling and expressing what is to be conveyed.(Benjamin 78)

 

Literal translation seeks to uncover the language spoken by God in creating the universe–that is, a language of naming. For literal translation, the proper name is a matter of crucial importance. Names cannot be translated, strictly speaking–they stand at the very edge of language, at the boundary of signification. Names have meaning (they refer to objects), and yet they do not mean (they cannot be defined). The name is language beyond meaning, without meaning–a language “lost” by humanity (because “confused” by God) at the Tower of Babel.

 

Benjamin’s views on translation come explicitly into the realm of theology, and they are close to a kind of Kabbalist mysticism. Like non-reading, literal translation draws language back to a point of ineffability, to the edge of the human world. It empties language of significance, reducing it to a material residuum alone. Literal translation refuses to allow the separation of meaning from its physical embodiment, and thereby it de-values the question of meaning. The ideal of exegetical translation is rejected. However, the absence of an extratextual realm of meaning does not liberate translation but rather constrains it, and perhaps even renders it impossible.

 

Materialist Reading

 

The reader invents the work as an authority, something worth owning. This law of ownership is equivalent to the desire for translation, and for exegesis. Barthes identified this kind of reading with the readerly, the “text of pleasure.” In its explorations of narrative codes, strategies of authority, and the production of meaning, Barthes’s writings, and especially S/Z, present an important contribution to the theology of reading. Fernando Belo’s book, A Materialist Reading of the Gospel of Mark, is one of the few sustained attempts apart from S/Z itself to apply this method to any writing, although one might argue that Calvino’s novel playfully hoists Barthes on his own petard.

 

S/Z is an immensely complex and close reading of Honore de Balzac’s novella, Sarrasine. Barthes divided Balzac’s story into 561 “lexias,” which he then analyzed in terms of five “codes” which he found operating throughout that narrative. A lexia is a phrase (in the sense that Jean-Francois Lyotard has given to that term), an individual semantic unit which may range in length from part of a sentence to several sentences. The codes are the cultural and intellectual filters through which the great abstract repository of langue becomes the limited specificity of parole, and through which the field of potential signification (what Kristeva calls the semiotic) is formed into a narrative world (what Kristeva calls the symbolic). The codes permit and also channel the conjunction of signifier and signified.

 

The codes form the structures through which Sarrasine creates the readerly illusion of a transparent window (a story within a story) opening on to a coherent and realistic world. In the larger, “framing” story, an unnamed man attempts, and fails, to seduce a beautiful young woman by agreeing to reveal to her the identity of a mysterious old man. This revelation takes the form of a story (the inner, “framed” story) of a foolish and impetuous artist (Sarrasine) who mistakes a beautiful castrato (La Zambinella) for a woman and falls in love with “her,” with fatal consequences. Barthes’s detailed analysis of these codes, one or more of which functions in each of the lexias, reveals that they conceal a deep narrative incoherence (the writerly), an absence or deficiency (a castration) which the narrative both represents and is.

 

This catastrophic collapse always takes the same form: that of an unrestrained metonymy. By abolishing the paradigmatic barriers, this metonymy abolishes the power of legal substitution on which meaning is based: it is then no longer possible regularly to contrast opposites, sexes, possessions; it is no longer possible to safeguard an order of just equivalence; in a word, it is no longer possible to represent, to make things representative, individuated, separate, assigned. (215-216) At its discreet urging, we want to ask the classic text: What are you thinking about? but the text, wilier than all those who try to escape by answering: about nothing, does not reply, giving meaning its last closure: suspension.(217)

 

The writerly is the resistance which the text offers to coherent meaning–not an active resistance, as of a living presence (such as the intention of an author), but a passive, inertial resistance, a kind of friction. It is lodged in the materiality of the text as writing (hence Barthes’s term). This materiality disrupts the narrative codes, interrupting their operation or setting them against one another, and therefore the writerly may be identified through the frustration of the reader’s desire for a readerly, followable narrative. The writerly consists in those elements of the text which remain opaque to reading, refusing to be reduced to a consistent and comprehensive understanding–and which are present in even the most readerly and realistic narratives, such as Sarrasine.

 

Every instance of language is at least somewhat writerly, and there are some texts which resist any coherent reading. The conflict over meaning is somehow essential to the attempt to read these writings, which are in effect all surface, a surface which reflects parabolically upon itself and which never opens up to reveal unambiguously an extratextual truth. The materiality of the text appears whenever reference is suspended or otherwise incomplete. Barthes argued that the readerly work must disappear whenever the writerly text appears, that the text de-authorizes or de-constitutes the work (“From Work to Text” 78-79).

 

Through his reading of Balzac, Barthes (like Benjamin) recovered in a secular way a strand of the Kabbalah, the mystical rabbinic reading of Torah which attended even to the physical shapes of the Hebrew letters, and which has been long overlooked by the logocentric idealist tradition which has dominated Western philosophical and theological thinking–the theology of the text. Barthes’s reading praxis is a Benjaminian translation; the “pure language” of the Balzacian text is uncovered, and it speaks. Through his reading of Barthes (and of the gospel of Mark), Belo has re-imported this sort of reading into biblical studies. Belo’s “materialist reading” of Mark is not merely so in the sense that as a Marxist analysis, it is materialistic. Rather, it is materialist also (and perhaps more so) in that it attends to the written/printed text as a material body.

 

Belo follows the same method that Barthes used, adopting some of Barthes’s codes and identifying others appropriate to Mark’s text. He claims that he intends to read Mark in terms of its narrative qualities alone, and with no regard to its referential truth-value (95). In order to do so, he divides the gospel of Mark into 73 “sequences,” each made up of one or more “scenes.” Here he compromises Barthes’s text-analytical method by combining it with traditional historical-critical views; Belo’s “sequences” are established from critical pericopes, irreducible atoms of the tradition behind the synoptic gospels as uncovered by biblical scholarship of the last two centuries. The bulk of Belo’s book consists of detailed and often provocative reading of these sequences in terms of the relevant codes.

 

However, despite his ingenious adaptation of codes which Barthes developed for study of a nineteenth-century French Romantic novella, so that they are also relevant to a first-century Hellenistic Jewish gospel, Belo rarely uncovers in Mark the sort of remarkable narrative structures that Barthes does in Sarrasine. This is not a consequence of the differences between these texts. The gospel of Mark is more writerly than Balzac’s story, although its long entombment within the security of the Christian canon has protected it from this sort of critical reading. Nonetheless, studies of the gospels in recent years have gone far toward penetrating that security. Belo is apparently unaware of these studies.⁴

 

In addition, Belo frequently accepts the judgments of traditional bourgeois biblical scholarship–the very judgments which he claims to be rejecting!–not only in relation to matters of dating and provenance of the gospel (96-97), but also and apparently unconsciously in relation to many points of exegesis. Belo admits that his reading is “naive” (1). This naivete contributes to the charm and originality of his book. However, what is most disturbing about Belo’s reading of Mark at these points is its quality of naturalness.

 

Belo’s reading “de-materializes” the Markan text in an effort to bring to it a kind of closure. This closed text refers to participation in an apostolic succession which continues in contemporary movements of liberation, and it turns the oppressed peoples of the world into a new Israel. To this corresponds Belo’s reading of the Markan Jesus as a Pauline Jesus (206, 297), or a Jesus who abandons Judaism in order to turn to the gentiles, and who is stopped by Jewish authorities before his revolutionary plans can be fully realized.⁵ Liberation of the oppressed is a worthy goal, but if that alone is what Mark is “really” about, then the text may once again have been closed in the name of logocentric univocity.

 

I share Belo’s political sympathies, and I share his disgust with the theological tepidity of contemporary bourgeois churches, but I suspect (as I think Barthes would) those points in Belo’s reading where the reader’s need for a committed writing overwhelms the materiality of the text. I then become a non-reader. This tests both my reading and Belo’s. The strengths of his reading are in those places (and they are many) where it is itself radically shaken or disrupted by the writerly qualities of the gospel of Mark, where Mark’s refusal of the bourgeois reading emerges through its refusal of any single dominant reading–even Belo’s.

 

The gospel of Mark is not a politically neutral text. Few texts do the job of confronting and rejecting the reader’s need for power and for control as well as Mark does. My objections to Belo’s book do not center upon his political reading, but upon his apparent desire to have his reading be the only reading. This creates a conflict which may be inherent in any reading, but which is suppressed all too often. Belo’s ability to call Mark’s textual resistance to our attention emphasizes the degree to which many readers have failed to see that resistance. It is this ideological dimension of Mark–its resistance to the reader–which demands a materialist reading. Yet it is precisely this resistance which can never be read, which can only be encountered, by any reader, as the unreadable, the non- readerliness of the text. Belo’s reading reveals the alienness of Mark’s story, and this can only happen through close attention to the materiality of the text.

 

Belo’s book carries profound implications for those who engage in theological enquiry beyond the confines of traditional religious institutions.⁶ His book concludes with a long “Essay in Materialist Ecclesiology” in which Belo sketches an “ecclesial” understanding of the “collective son of man” as a material presence in the world–as a body composed of hands, feet, and eyes. This body, which is inherently political, is in Mark’s view (as interpreted by Belo) Jesus’s body. It is not a body to be abandoned in an ascension to some spiritual realm, but rather it is the text itself incarnate in its readers, in this physical world, the only place where the kingdom of God might be.

 

The continuity thus refers us to the figure of the collective Son of man at the level of the erased text; this figure . . . functions in the register of a continuity that is indicated by the ascensional schema in which the starting point is earth. Let us demythologize this figure. . . . What will be left of the figure of the collective Son of man will be the communist program of his practice, [and] his subversiveness.(287)

 

For Belo, this means a re-opening of the question of resurrection, for he insists that salvation in the gospel of Mark is always salvation of the body. The “body of Christ” is no easy theological metaphor here. Belo argues that the messianic narrative of Mark lies in fundamental opposition to the theological discourse of the institutional church. It is this discourse which keeps the church from being able to read Mark in liberative fashion.

 

The Gospel narrative is articulated with the indefinite play of the narratives of its readings, a play that must not be closured, even in the name of reason, even in the name of God. The debate thus opened concerns the evaluation of the power at work in the practice of the bodies which we are.(294)

 

By playing the culturally-determined pressures toward signification (the codes) over against the writerly resistance offered by the materiality of the text, Belo’s materialist reading treads a fine line. At every step it threatens the obliteration of the very thing which makes it possible. On the one hand, the desire to produce a coherent reading is very powerful, and perhaps irresistible. On the other hand, it is the materiality of the text–its otherness–that refuses the hegemony of bourgeois theology and opens a space for Belo’s alternative reading.

 

Concrete Theology

 

Literal translation, the non-reader, and materialist reading offer approaches to a theology of reading which stress the physical, concrete aspects of the text in ways customarily ignored by traditional theories of the text, as well as by much of the Jewish and nearly all of the Christian theological tradition. Calvino, Benjamin, and Belo provide examples of what I have elsewhere called “concrete theology.”⁷ The theology of the text understands the text as an incarnate yet ultimately spiritual word. In contrast, concrete theology is a theology of reading which seeks to discover the essential carnality of the word in the materiality of the text, language at those points where it bodies itself into concrete reality, apart from any signification, exceeding its own metaphysical limits.

 

Concrete theology desires the “new word,” the word which is as yet or once again meaningless–not really a word, but only potentially one. It seeks this word in nonsense, incoherence, and gibberish. (This is not glossolalia, for which the “speaking in tongues” is already Spirit-filled.) In this it is both materialistic and mystical. Concrete theology therefore attends closely to those points where language resists rational or empirical analysis, where the rules of meaning are broken–for example, questions of fictionality, connotation, and metaphor.

 

Concrete theology rejects the theology of the text, and in so doing it makes problematic the very meaning of “theology.” Nevertheless, the word “theology” points to the ongoing, inevitable, and inescapable slide of language and thought toward metaphysical (logocentric, onto-theological) closure–the inevitable return of the traditional understanding of the text. All language and thought, even the most atheistic, the most secular, and the most scientific, is caught in the gravitational field of this great black hole which we call by words such as “presence” and “reference.” Only poetry in its most radical, linguistically self-destructive forms comes close to escaping the vortex–but in such poetry, language is at its most concrete. This is the maximum degree of the writerly.

 

As a theology of reading, concrete theology is intensely interested in books, writings, scripture.⁸ However, concrete theology rejects the Bible as authority, just as Belo rejects the appropriation of biblical truth by bourgeois theology, and just as Irnerio rejects the demand of every writing, the demand to be read. Concrete theology reads the Bible against the grain of established theological truth. It also rejects the church’s claim to ownership of the Bible–concrete theology liberates the Bible from the church’s hermeneutic control. It refuses the closed canon as such. The Bible becomes for it just another text, or rather, many texts. For concrete theology, the Bible is many bibles, an expanding and contracting and multiple text, a shimmering of texts which cannot be contained in any one book.

 

For concrete theology, exegesis is eisegesis. A better term than either of these is one recently proposed by Gary Phillips, “intergesis,” which suggests a reading between the texts, or intertextual reading. The term “exegesis” is an ideological subterfuge used to conceal a preference for one type of eisegesis over others, to make one way of reading into the text appear to be the natural, normal reading- out of what the text had within it. The works of Calvino, Benjamin, and Barthes, among others, have made it clear that there is no such thing as an objective meaning hidden within any text. The notion of a scientific critical exegesis is as dangerous in its own way as the proclamation of the “true meaning of the Bible” (as inspired by God) on the part of fundamentalist religion, to which the theology of the text is functionally equivalent.

 

There are no limits to eisegesis, or to misreading. As a translation from the materiality of the text, every reading is a misreading, turning the text into what it is not. Still, to say that there are no correct interpretations doesn’t mean that there are no incorrect interpretations. One who reads Sarrasine and understands La Zambinella to be a woman, or a gay man, does not read “the same story” as another who understands the accepted meaning of “castrato.”⁹ An alternative set of codes which permit the understanding of “castrato” as, e.g., “a type of woman” is not inconceivable, but such a reading would render incoherent the narrative structures of Sarrasine. In such a reading the bounds of intertextuality would be strained to the point of “anything goes,” and the thwarted desire for meaning would destroy the prospect of its own satisfaction.

 

However, reading is a juggling of codes, trying to get it all to “work out right.” One misreading leads to another. I read Belo’s book within the context of an attempt to understand concrete theology. I sought a materialist reading of his materialist reading. I did not read Belo in the context in which Belo reads the gospel of Mark, and yet his reading is not entirely unlike Irnerio’s non-reading, either. In addition, Belo also permits a reading from within another context, the context of “the other.” Every (re)reading changes the context and opens a way for the other. The material text–physical marks on the page–is liberated from one context, and it is transported (translated) into another. The material text remains “the same” (physically), but the meaning must be altered. It is a misunderstanding–but then, all readings are inevitably misreadings.

 

What is needed is an understanding of the tensions between resistance inherent in the physical aspects of the text, and ideological pressures brought to bear upon it by readers. Like Irnerio, I reshape Belo’s work to fit my own desire–I read into it. As a middle-class male gentile white heterosexual North American, I am perpetually in serious danger of reclaiming Belo’s radically neo-Marxist reading of Mark for the sort of bourgeois theology over against which he sets his own reading. That is a risk which I must take, or else not read (that is, not translate) and remain silent–unlike Irnerio, whose non-reading culminates in the work of art. Nonetheless, my reading is also not entirely foreign to Belo’s, even as it cannot be identical to his. It stands over against his book, touching it (I hope) as a tangent to a circle.

 

The text is the specific, material product of a concrete act of production. For the logocentric, idealist tradition, the materiality of language is only the temporary and ultimately transparent medium for the spirituality of meaning. For materialist reading, in contrast, marks on the surface of the page are not merely the vehicle or channel of a fundamentally independent meaning, passing it on from an earlier, extratextual realm (such as the mind of an author) so that it may eventually be translated back to a different, but also extratextual, location (the mind of a reader). Instead, these marks are opaque, inert, and resistant to the desire for meaning. The differences through which they signify are themselves without meaning. The material body of the text conceals even as (and more than) it reveals. Different texts are not copies of some ideal original, and they cannot be collapsed into some universal, spiritual entity.

 

Concrete theology is the name for awareness of the tensions involved between the desire for, and the resistance to, meaning. Concrete theology therefore also offers a way of non-reading. It presents a different reading, an alternative reading, from the mainstreams of the Jewish and Christian traditions. It is a reading of the otherness of the text which may well appear to traditional readers as a mutilation of the text. It looks so intensely at the text that the words disappear, not into ideas as they do for traditional readings, but into meaningless marks. Concrete theology can never be more than a prolegomenon, a not-quite- theology, a via negativa which can only announce what it is not.

 

Notes

 

1. Increasingly, texts are not a matter of ink and paper but of magnetic or laser-optic recordings. What will the relative invisibility of such media, unreadable without special machinery, do to our thinking about texts and reading? How will the change in the physical stuff of the text itself change our theology of the text?

 

2. Some analytic philosophers reserve the word “text” for the physical object (words on a page); what I call here the ideal or spiritual text, they call the “work.” The work is a self-identical artistic entity (for example, a particular story) which may be found in various texts. Barthes made a similar distinction, identifying the work with the readerly, the “text of pleasure.” Foucault notes some logical difficulties in the concept of “the work” (143-44).

 

3. Varieties of reader-response criticism remain popular and influential in literary studies, but they will not be discussed here. However, some criticisms of reader- response theory may be inferred from the following.

 

4. With the exception of Louis Marin’s important book and the work of a few other French structuralists, Belo does not cite any of the literary and narratological studies of the gospels of the last several decades. His references to English-speaking biblical scholars are to an earlier generation.

 

5. Belo’s reading here is not at all foreign to the history of bourgeois biblical scholarship, despite his claims to the contrary, but it suggests an anti-Semitism which is arguably foreign to the gospel of Mark. One finds echoes of this at several points in Belo’s reading, such as his comments on Jesus’s interactions with the Gerasene demoniac (pagans do not endanger Jesus, 130) and with the Syrophoenician woman (as an alteration of Jesus’s strategy, 145).

 

6. See my essay, “Post-Ecclesiastical Theology,” Explorations (Spring,1992).

 

7. “In order to exceed the limits, theology must uncover the not-itself which lies unnamed at its center, its hidden eccentricity and non-identity: it must become concrete” (Aichele 138-139).

 

8. “[T]o describe systems of meaning by postulating a final signified is to side against the very nature of meaning. . . . Scripture is a privileged domain for this problem, because, on the one hand, theologically, it is certain that a final signified is postulated: the metaphysical definition or the semantic definition of theology is to postulate the Last Signified; and because, on the other hand, the very notion of Scripture, the fact that the Bible is called Scripture, Writing, would orient us toward a more ambiguous comprehension of the problems, as if effectively, and theologically too, the base, the princeps, were still a Writing, and always a Writing” (Barthes, The Semiotic Challenge 242).

 

9. When I teach S/Z, I have the students read Sarrasine first, on their own. Several usually come up with such readings.

Works Cited

 

• Aichele, George. The Limits of Story. Chico, Calif.: Scholars P, 1985.
• Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974.
• —. “From Work to Text.” Textual Strategies. Ed. and introd. Josue V. Harari. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1979.
• —. The Semiotic Challenge. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1988.
• Belo, Fernando. A Materialist Reading of the Gospel of Mark. Trans. Matthew J. O’Connell. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1981.
• Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.
• Calvino, Italo. If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1981.
• de Man, Paul. The Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.
• Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981.
• —. The Ear of the Other. Trans. Peggy Kamuf and Avital Ronell. New York: Schocken Books, 1985.
• Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” Textual Strategies. Ed. and introd. Josue V. Harari. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1979.
• Frege, Gottlob. Translations From the Writings of Gottlob Frege. Trans. and ed. P.T. Geach and M. Black. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1952.
• Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia UP, 1984.
• Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Differend. Trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.
• Phillips, Gary A. “‘What is Written? How are You Reading?’ Gospel, Intertextuality and Doing Lukewise: A Writerly Reading of Lk 10:25-37 (and 38-42).” Society of Biblical Literature Seminar Papers. Atlanta: Scholars P, 1992.