Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

The Lives of Objects: Material Culture, Experience, and the Real in the History of Early Christianity, By Maia Kotrosits

The Lives of Objects: Material Culture, Experience, and the Real in the History of Early... In the spring of 1906, the German biblical scholar Adolf Deissmann traveled to the Mediterranean to visit its ancient ruins. Deissmann’s trip was transformative. Recalling his travels in his now famous Light from the Ancient East (Hodder and Stoughton, 1910), Deissmann dwells on the Mediterranean’s light. This light changes perception, brings the sacred to life, interprets the mysteries of ancient objects, sets sculptures moving, and revivifies the apostles and evangelists (xxv–xxvi). Things looked different under the Mediterranean sun than they did back in Heidelberg. Deissmann’s pilgrimage animated his study of the literary remains of the earliest Christians and set a scholarly agenda that has continued into the present. Deissmann put the earliest Christians back into the warp and woof of daily life, using objects found by archaeologists: inscriptions, ostraca, epitaphs, and the scraps of papyrus emerging from excavations in Egypt. For Deissmann, the eastern light was required to reveal the proletarian truths of the earliest Christians, the catalyst for an alchemy of place, object, text, and interpreter. Deissmann’s New Testament came alive when this light shone on the ruins of Mediterranean antiquity. A few years before Deissmann’s trip, Sigmund Freud made an unplanned visit to Athens. Standing on the Acropolis, Freud found himself suddenly thinking, “So all this really does exist, just as we learnt at school!” Some years later, Freud would reflect on why his visit to Athens made him retroactively doubt the history he had learned in school (“A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis,” 1936, SE 22:237–48). Freud’s reflections circle around the distortions and transformations of memory afforded by our entanglement with things. Another alchemy occurs, not of an orientalist light that brings the past unmediated into the present, but a torsion of the real in which the past, memory, psychic drives, and the things we touch, see, and feel are transformed. Maia Kotrosits’s The Lives of Objects elicited in me a fantasy: what if Deissmann had gone to see Freud to process his experience? Deissmann’s fascination with the light was born of an orientalist fantasy of the East, but also of his own desires worked out within and through the memory of the things that became suddenly tangible to him on his travels. A visit to the Viennese psychoanalyst might have forced Deissmann to see his light not as a revelation into the true essence of things, but as fantasy and imagination that, in Kotrosits’s words, are “psychosocial processes that assemble disparate elements of a noncoherent world into a working if also frequently contradictory set of devised scenarios” (9). “Herr Doktor,” Freud might have said, “perhaps we could talk about your anxieties and desires, delve into your memories and fears, before we continue waxing poetic about this light you say you saw.” Since we are talking about fantasies, I would like to arrange therapy sessions for contemporary biblical scholars, liberal and conservative alike, for whom the objects that remain from the ancient world continue to evoke fantasies, ranging from the desire to prove the bible historically accurate to the final resolution of interpretive problems. For many biblical scholars, material objects, even without the Mediterranean sunshine, remain able to facilitate enlightenment. The Lives of Objects stages a necessary and important intervention in the fantasy life of not only biblical scholars, but humanists more broadly, and calls for some psychoanalytically inspired self-reflection on our investments with things. Kotrosits’s title is itself a Rorschach test for potential readers. One might expect such a book to be concerned with non-human actants, how things speak and act and do, but the objects that Kotrosits has in mind are those produced in that interstitial space between our psychic lives and the external world. It is thus not a book about things, but about somethings, those somethings that are there, unaccounted for, unspoken, holding together the compulsive and obsessive returns of scholars to their texts (110). Fantasy. Anxiety. Desire. Scholars are rarely encouraged to search for such things. Speaking of the anxiety of an author or the desire of a text risks “psychologizing,” presuming an external knowledge of the intent of the author. Kotrosits challenges readers to risk interrogating such topics. In her hands, fantasy, anxiety, and desire are not invocations of access to intent, as any psychoanalyst would tell you, but to the incomplete, contradictory attempts to stitch a reality or a self or a text together (96). They thus prompt us to look for that which is unspoken yet holds a text or a narrative together. Scholars of early Christianity have long been trained to avoid psychologizing. Instead, we substitute cultural codes and social mores, reconstructions of historical context, as grids of recognizability. Our sources become actors with prescribed roles. This paints a flat picture of ancient life from the outside. This is a good thing in some ways. It prevents us from merely making the ancients like ourselves. But such a toolkit also risks obscuring what might be common between us and the materials we seek to understand. After all, our bodies and brains have not evolved much in the course of two millennia. Paying attention to those bodies as desiring subjects requires attention to the drives and fantasies common to ancient and modern readers alike. The past and our engagements with it are fantasy all the way down. Kotrosits’s excavation of fantasies that animate ancient texts opens up startlingly new encounters. Kotrosits deftly finds subtle inflections that bring together, for example, Revelation and Pausanias (ch. 2), and ancient graffiti, the book of Daniel, and the Gospel of Mark (ch. 3). What connects these texts are not theories of influence or philological parallels but shared anxieties around lives lived in the ruins of empire and shared worries around the durability of memory. What unites many of Kotrosits’s readings is a rethinking of how ruins, martyrdom, memory, and power relate to the fantasy of the Roman Empire itself. The empire is always present in Kotrosits’s readings, not as an oppressive apparatus against which clean lines of resistance or accommodation are drawn but as an absent, inconsistent, contradictory fantasy that Christians and others are variously participating in. In an excellent chapter co-authored with Carly Daniel-Hughes, Tertullian of Carthage finds himself on the analysts’ couch. Tertullian is known to history as a brazen defender of Christian virtue in the face of Roman persecution, by turns inventive and vindictive, crisscrossing the lines between orthodox and heretical. On their couch, his therapists reveal the North African theologian to be an ancient internet troll, writing out “into the void” his “florid fantasies about Roman power and its possibilities” (91). As the authors rightly point out, most of those who dwelt within the borders of the Roman Empire would never see an emperor or even a provincial governor (88). As such, writers like Tertullian imagined the empire within which they lived much the way that modern scholars do: through the visual propaganda and the architectural elaborations built by the absent center in cities throughout the empire. These objects then become sites of transference, “the projection of the qualities or thoughts the patient imagines the analyst possesses” (86). We might grant that our literary sources engage in a certain amount of literary flair, but it has long been the practice of historians to trust their descriptions of their world as largely accurate. What would it take to reckon with the possibility that our sources are fantasizing about the Roman Empire, about themselves, and about their identities in much the same way and to the same extent that we are? Kotrosits’s deft deployment of the psychosocial fantasies that silently structure our sources is also trained squarely at those of us who study them. What drives us to study early Christian texts? What impels us to (re)turn to them over and over in search of answers about their contexts and meanings and for insights into our corners of modernity? The old answers (curiosity, a naive interest in the past, theological commitments) will not suffice. Kotrosits models a way to answer these questions, connecting the texts she reads to her own traumas, therapeutic journey, and academic wrestling. This is not to say that we meet the real Kotrosits unmediated in these pages, but what we are afforded is a bold performance of how to come to grips with the psychosocial and erotic processes that shape, focus, and drive scholarship before pen is put to paper. Kotrosits’s work puts scholars of early Christianity in the crosshairs (and on notice), but this is not a book for narrow specialists. For the humanities writ large, Kotrosits also offers something immensely important: the fantasies of ancient Christian texts are also haunting the cutting edges of continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, affect studies . . . what we might call Theory. To the denizens of English departments and those writing New York Times op-eds on the deaths of the humanities: ignore such ancient ghosts at your own peril. © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Academy of Religion. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Journal of the American Academy of Religion Oxford University Press

The Lives of Objects: Material Culture, Experience, and the Real in the History of Early Christianity, By Maia Kotrosits

Download PDF
3 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/oxford-university-press/the-lives-of-objects-material-culture-experience-and-the-real-in-the-87ZtZUckTt

References (0)

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
Oxford University Press
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Academy of Religion. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.
ISSN
0002-7189
eISSN
1477-4585
DOI
10.1093/jaarel/lfab060
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

In the spring of 1906, the German biblical scholar Adolf Deissmann traveled to the Mediterranean to visit its ancient ruins. Deissmann’s trip was transformative. Recalling his travels in his now famous Light from the Ancient East (Hodder and Stoughton, 1910), Deissmann dwells on the Mediterranean’s light. This light changes perception, brings the sacred to life, interprets the mysteries of ancient objects, sets sculptures moving, and revivifies the apostles and evangelists (xxv–xxvi). Things looked different under the Mediterranean sun than they did back in Heidelberg. Deissmann’s pilgrimage animated his study of the literary remains of the earliest Christians and set a scholarly agenda that has continued into the present. Deissmann put the earliest Christians back into the warp and woof of daily life, using objects found by archaeologists: inscriptions, ostraca, epitaphs, and the scraps of papyrus emerging from excavations in Egypt. For Deissmann, the eastern light was required to reveal the proletarian truths of the earliest Christians, the catalyst for an alchemy of place, object, text, and interpreter. Deissmann’s New Testament came alive when this light shone on the ruins of Mediterranean antiquity. A few years before Deissmann’s trip, Sigmund Freud made an unplanned visit to Athens. Standing on the Acropolis, Freud found himself suddenly thinking, “So all this really does exist, just as we learnt at school!” Some years later, Freud would reflect on why his visit to Athens made him retroactively doubt the history he had learned in school (“A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis,” 1936, SE 22:237–48). Freud’s reflections circle around the distortions and transformations of memory afforded by our entanglement with things. Another alchemy occurs, not of an orientalist light that brings the past unmediated into the present, but a torsion of the real in which the past, memory, psychic drives, and the things we touch, see, and feel are transformed. Maia Kotrosits’s The Lives of Objects elicited in me a fantasy: what if Deissmann had gone to see Freud to process his experience? Deissmann’s fascination with the light was born of an orientalist fantasy of the East, but also of his own desires worked out within and through the memory of the things that became suddenly tangible to him on his travels. A visit to the Viennese psychoanalyst might have forced Deissmann to see his light not as a revelation into the true essence of things, but as fantasy and imagination that, in Kotrosits’s words, are “psychosocial processes that assemble disparate elements of a noncoherent world into a working if also frequently contradictory set of devised scenarios” (9). “Herr Doktor,” Freud might have said, “perhaps we could talk about your anxieties and desires, delve into your memories and fears, before we continue waxing poetic about this light you say you saw.” Since we are talking about fantasies, I would like to arrange therapy sessions for contemporary biblical scholars, liberal and conservative alike, for whom the objects that remain from the ancient world continue to evoke fantasies, ranging from the desire to prove the bible historically accurate to the final resolution of interpretive problems. For many biblical scholars, material objects, even without the Mediterranean sunshine, remain able to facilitate enlightenment. The Lives of Objects stages a necessary and important intervention in the fantasy life of not only biblical scholars, but humanists more broadly, and calls for some psychoanalytically inspired self-reflection on our investments with things. Kotrosits’s title is itself a Rorschach test for potential readers. One might expect such a book to be concerned with non-human actants, how things speak and act and do, but the objects that Kotrosits has in mind are those produced in that interstitial space between our psychic lives and the external world. It is thus not a book about things, but about somethings, those somethings that are there, unaccounted for, unspoken, holding together the compulsive and obsessive returns of scholars to their texts (110). Fantasy. Anxiety. Desire. Scholars are rarely encouraged to search for such things. Speaking of the anxiety of an author or the desire of a text risks “psychologizing,” presuming an external knowledge of the intent of the author. Kotrosits challenges readers to risk interrogating such topics. In her hands, fantasy, anxiety, and desire are not invocations of access to intent, as any psychoanalyst would tell you, but to the incomplete, contradictory attempts to stitch a reality or a self or a text together (96). They thus prompt us to look for that which is unspoken yet holds a text or a narrative together. Scholars of early Christianity have long been trained to avoid psychologizing. Instead, we substitute cultural codes and social mores, reconstructions of historical context, as grids of recognizability. Our sources become actors with prescribed roles. This paints a flat picture of ancient life from the outside. This is a good thing in some ways. It prevents us from merely making the ancients like ourselves. But such a toolkit also risks obscuring what might be common between us and the materials we seek to understand. After all, our bodies and brains have not evolved much in the course of two millennia. Paying attention to those bodies as desiring subjects requires attention to the drives and fantasies common to ancient and modern readers alike. The past and our engagements with it are fantasy all the way down. Kotrosits’s excavation of fantasies that animate ancient texts opens up startlingly new encounters. Kotrosits deftly finds subtle inflections that bring together, for example, Revelation and Pausanias (ch. 2), and ancient graffiti, the book of Daniel, and the Gospel of Mark (ch. 3). What connects these texts are not theories of influence or philological parallels but shared anxieties around lives lived in the ruins of empire and shared worries around the durability of memory. What unites many of Kotrosits’s readings is a rethinking of how ruins, martyrdom, memory, and power relate to the fantasy of the Roman Empire itself. The empire is always present in Kotrosits’s readings, not as an oppressive apparatus against which clean lines of resistance or accommodation are drawn but as an absent, inconsistent, contradictory fantasy that Christians and others are variously participating in. In an excellent chapter co-authored with Carly Daniel-Hughes, Tertullian of Carthage finds himself on the analysts’ couch. Tertullian is known to history as a brazen defender of Christian virtue in the face of Roman persecution, by turns inventive and vindictive, crisscrossing the lines between orthodox and heretical. On their couch, his therapists reveal the North African theologian to be an ancient internet troll, writing out “into the void” his “florid fantasies about Roman power and its possibilities” (91). As the authors rightly point out, most of those who dwelt within the borders of the Roman Empire would never see an emperor or even a provincial governor (88). As such, writers like Tertullian imagined the empire within which they lived much the way that modern scholars do: through the visual propaganda and the architectural elaborations built by the absent center in cities throughout the empire. These objects then become sites of transference, “the projection of the qualities or thoughts the patient imagines the analyst possesses” (86). We might grant that our literary sources engage in a certain amount of literary flair, but it has long been the practice of historians to trust their descriptions of their world as largely accurate. What would it take to reckon with the possibility that our sources are fantasizing about the Roman Empire, about themselves, and about their identities in much the same way and to the same extent that we are? Kotrosits’s deft deployment of the psychosocial fantasies that silently structure our sources is also trained squarely at those of us who study them. What drives us to study early Christian texts? What impels us to (re)turn to them over and over in search of answers about their contexts and meanings and for insights into our corners of modernity? The old answers (curiosity, a naive interest in the past, theological commitments) will not suffice. Kotrosits models a way to answer these questions, connecting the texts she reads to her own traumas, therapeutic journey, and academic wrestling. This is not to say that we meet the real Kotrosits unmediated in these pages, but what we are afforded is a bold performance of how to come to grips with the psychosocial and erotic processes that shape, focus, and drive scholarship before pen is put to paper. Kotrosits’s work puts scholars of early Christianity in the crosshairs (and on notice), but this is not a book for narrow specialists. For the humanities writ large, Kotrosits also offers something immensely important: the fantasies of ancient Christian texts are also haunting the cutting edges of continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, affect studies . . . what we might call Theory. To the denizens of English departments and those writing New York Times op-eds on the deaths of the humanities: ignore such ancient ghosts at your own peril. © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Academy of Religion. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)

Journal

Journal of the American Academy of Religion – Oxford University Press

Published: Sep 9, 2021

There are no references for this article.