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A Phallic Shadow

Phallophanies (Version Francaise)

Interview par Jacques Henric, art press no. 262, novembre 2000.

You are a medievalist with a passion for theology and an avid reader of Freud and Lacan Would you say that you are exposing theology to the "risk" of psychoanalysis. Or vice versa?

Reading Lacan, I found formulations in his writing that are lifted from theology. For example, "The real is impossible" is in Saint Augustine, even if he applies it to God and not to the unconscious. The difference is that psychoanalysis proposes a radical anthropologization of God. In Saint Augustine, God is not in man, He is outside the world, whereas in Lacan God is unconscious. He is a fragment of unconsciousness borne by our incarnate body. Another difference: to be effective, the ethic of psychoanalysis has to limit itself. Its goal is to enable the precarious happiness of individuals, insofar as, within the social sphere, they are subject to repression, and insofar as they are unable to speak their desire. Whereas it seems to me that the ethic of Christianity from which, as an ethic of love, Freud drew back, goes much further. Psychoanalysis has no ethical vision of society. It has a project for individual singularities. Christianity addresses the community. That said, one could argue that Lacan sheds light on theology by enabling us to rethink all its figures. His attitude towards what he called "true religion" was highly instructive for me. It opens a breach for us dechristianized thinkers, as victims of a certain kind of Enlightenment stupidity. Lacan never thought of religion as simply a priestly plot to enslave the masses. For him, religion is a light cast on desire.

You insist on the point that the Christian religion is not a myth, and that it is more than just a matter of belief.

Yes, I did come round to thinking of all theological thought as thought about the real, and action on the real. As a medievalist, I could not work on literary texts without bearing in mind the theological basis that is the very context of their thought. At first, theology for me was just one object of knowledge among others. Later, it gradually became the actual substance of my thought, and I am trying to draw a kind of map (to be constantly updated) so as to see if certain Christian motifs could still speak to us now.

Starting with Genesis, theology struck me, with its dynamics of rupture, to be an unprecedented attempt to get rid of the mythological thought in which humanity at the time was bogged down. In fact, mythology put up a pretty good fight because, countering what I call this thought of the real, there immediately emerged a myth of Christianity, or let's say, Christianity as myth, which, on its way to us, has been deformed yet further by the filter of the Enlightenment. Which is why it is so difficult to appreciate the demythologizing effort involved. So I had to go back to the sources, to bypass this somewhat reductive 18th-century rationalism to get at the nub of Christian thought. One of the important tasks of Christianity was to destroy the idol so as to constitute the icon. The other, which was very important, was to destroy the myth of harmony between man and woman.

You add that theology is not so much knowledge as a structure of knowledge.

Mythology, which is an ensemble made up of teeming motifs, tales, fables and images, also has great structural coherence. Christianity was only able to throw it off by constituting its own solid structure of thought. The offensive was directed not only against the details, but also against the overarching logic of ancient thought. It called into question the rhetoric, the aesthetic and the ethic of paganism as well as its actual theology. This break in the continuity that defined the civilizations of the day is a unique historical phenomenon. Mythological thought is regularly restructured, but only marginally. It never changes fundamentally. For the first time in history, following the example of Moses, men were faced with the imperative need to make a radical break. Thus the Middle Ages, if we define them as Christian, are unlike any other period in any other civilization before or even afterwards. Take Japan, with the end of feudalism in the 1850s and the opening up to the West. Certainly there was a break here, and it is said that Japan was breaking with its medieval epoch. But it seems to me that the word is very ill-chosen because Japan was not medieval. What was destroyed in Japan at this time was a feudal system, and nothing more. For me, the name Middle Ages refers to a unique phenomenon, when pagans converted to Christianity had to cut themselves off from the roots of their own culture.

Discussing the advent of Christianity, you use the expression "epistemological break". Here, you argue, was the birth of modernity. Wasn't the decisive factor this question of incarnation?

Before, nobody had thought of putting the idea of God, or of the gods, to work in a real, historical man's body. If this "break" has been often hushed up, or denied, that is because, like all breaks, it was disturbing. It still is. People like continuity, it reassures them. To make these breaks apparent, I have devised a little instrument which I think is highly effective and perfectly economical: homonymization. By which I mean this: when Christ came along (and let us suppose he was speaking the truth) and said, "I am God," this did not mean anything like what the word "god" means in paganism (gods, in mythology, did not have bodies), no more than it meant the same as in Hebraic culture, even if the latter did begin to anthropomorphize God by giving Him a voice. Christianity took this breath and gave it a body. The conceptual instrument of homonymization is easy to use: the names remain the same but their meaning changes completely.

By modernity, I mean to signify that thought became historical the moment it was incarnated in a contingent body subject to all the vagaries of the passions, of desire, of the flesh, of history. Judeo-Christian thought is, I think, the only one capable of ushering and account for the sometimes brutal changes of epoch that humanity has always experienced. I am thinking, for example, of that other break that was the scientific revolution.

According to you, the Judeo-Christian ideas of creation and revelation were utterly new.

If I had to give a ten-second history of humanity, I would mention the following turning points: the moment when man became man by starting to talk; the invention of monotheism with Moses; the advent of God incarnate with Jesus; and the scientific revolution. If we look closely at all these tears in the fabric of mythological continuity, we will see that in fact they all came to us from the outside.

What did you find when you made your close study of certain images of Christ on the cross, particularly medieval and Renaissance ones? After Leo Steinberg's discoveries, what is this other purloined letter that was staring everyone in the face and that no one saw?

Thirty years ago, I was with a friend in Florence, looking at a Cimabue. My friend pointed at this crucifixion and said, "What do you see, there?" "Just a Christ on the cross." He told me to look carefully, and suddenly I saw the shadow of the Thing. This remained at the back of my mind until, one day, reading Steinberg's fascinating essay The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art, it occurred to me that his discoveries could probably be taken further. His book was amply researched and its thesis was spot-on, but in my eyes it still had a weakness: it was concerned only with objects, and more precisely with Christ's penis object.

Could you restate Steinberg's conclusions for me?

Instead of considering Christ's little penis as Lord knows what magic sign, as people did in those days, he saw it as indicating ideas about the Incarnation. At that moment in Christianity, they needed to show that Christ was fully human, a God, but in a man's body.

What Steinberg made us see is an imaginary object that became glaringly obvious, and that therefore became a visible object, a sex organ, imaged in its every state, including erection. What I discovered, though, is not glaringly obvious. It has remained invisible for centuries. This shadow which, without me knowing it, was in the back of my mind for thirty years, and which no one had seen before me, has a very different status from the Christic penis in Steinberg. It has managed to remain both invisible and visible in the representation. For a while I thought I was having mad dreams, I was projecting things, I was a prey to my fantasies. Today, with all the evidence that I have accumulated in my book, I am convinced that I am not seeing things, that this Thing in paintings is real.

So what is it? an image, a shadow, a phallic phantom that can usually be seen on the thorax of Christ on the cross, and which has very little to do with anatomy. No anatomic print has ever shown such a form. This shadow, which is sometimes huge, owes nothing to realism. This phallic form that Christ bears in the center of his body is sometimes full, sometimes hollow.

What has this discovery taught you?

First of all, this: in Christianity, for the first time, the phallic principle is not presented as something complementary to the feminine principle. It is no longer the fleshly join between man and woman, bridging the gulf of sexual difference. The famous harmony that is at the center of all myths, and which still exercises us today, is suddenly called into question.

Isn't the belief in that harmony the basis of all other beliefs?

Yes, absolutely. In fact, I call it bêtise (stupidity), in the etymological sense of bestia, of faith in the instinct that will always, and with surprising constancy, lead the male to his female. But this instinct is something that we lost as soon as we started to talk, because then everything turned into a symbolic hubbub in which it's very difficult to reach an understanding. The images I am talking about enact a total break with mythological stupidity, in the sense that they assert a completely separate phallic principle founded on symbolic castration. Of course, the Ancients knew very well what castration was, but all their images, and even the actions that were imposed by certain cults, notably emasculation (which is not castration, but which had the unconscious aim of approximating to symbolic castration)-all these images sought to counter the fact of castration. It's no coincidence that the phallic shadow that appears on the body of Christ on the cross appears at this moment of death. In this sense, the Christian fiction offers a truth because it confronts us with the castration that mythology tries to make us forget.

The moment of death is also the moment when Christ is absolutely alone, abandoned by all his disciples, immersed in the tragic idea of a radical failure, of the Word lost forever. This solitude of thought is matched by the solitude of the body, and the phallic shadow here is not a promise of reunion with woman, but an affirmation of an unparalleled, desperate separation. You can see why Resurrection had to be brought in here, because without it we would be facing total dereliction. Resurrection closes the circle and is translated in painting as an erect phallus, as in Raphael or Salviati. The irony is that this phallus is useless, because nobody in Paradise makes love. In this sense, the ultimate phallus remains a shadow that it is impossible to enframe in the idolatrous passion for images.

What is interesting here, as Lacan noted, is that by this radical withdrawal the representation of Christ comes to absorb all representations of human desire. Painters intuited this long before psychoanalysis came along. By shadowing in this Thing on the body of the Crucified One, they articulated an essential truth about the phallic function, one that is not really explicit in theological texts or in the Bible itself. You can find pointers, but it is painting, and only painting, that realizes all the consequences of dogma.

What do you think of this fashion for making Christ a woman?

Leo Steinberg gave a virulent and theologically very competent critique of this feminization. In fact, such attempts are not very important. Any object you replace Christ with is bound to be essentially phallic. Whether it is a woman, a cat, a shoe or a bit of breast, it always comes down to the same thing, however subversive one thinks one is being. Amusingly enough, this kind of infantile provocation has only strengthened the subtractive power of the phallic function and made it more powerful.

You reject the idea that Christianity was a sexually repressive force as opposed to the liberating tendency of paganism.

That old chestnut belongs to a modern variety of obscurantism. Yes, the received idea is that paganism glorified the flesh and wallowed in the carnal pleasures, while we poor Christians have been so repressed that we dream of going back to that pagan exaltation of the flesh. And yet the simple fact that God was made flesh heightens the value of the body. In The Flesh of Christ, by Tertullian, there is an admirable passage against the Gnostics in which he describes Mary's womb, with its humors and blood clots. Tertullian is answering Marcion, the gnostic who denied the humanity of Christ: "Well," he says, "I accept that reality, which may not be very appetizing, whereas you refuse it as unworthy of God; I take into account the whole body, in its deepest obscenity, even as absolute detritus, and I glorify it."

Paganism, as I see it, is a process of repression, not liberation. It regulates every detail of sexuality, even the most secret ones, it sacralizes them and turns them into a theater, so that desire is thus channeled through the image and, because it is subjected to representation, censored. There is nothing liberating about that to my eyes. And we might ask ourselves if, on the other hand, the Church Fathers did not reinvigorate desire by forbidding its representation and if, by an ironic detour, the patristic discourse did not serve sex. When Christianity turns violent on the issue of sex, as it does in Tertullian for example, we have to understand that in paganism the body often tends to become a dream, a fantasy that is infinitely manipulable, emptied of all reality. Christianity puts things back in their proper place by forcing all these violent, erotic and sacrificial dreams to take form, by obliging us to face their reality. Repression? I don't think so. The discourse of Christianity is realistic. It tells us that we can never escape our castration, that we must learn to live with it. Ethically, I think the lesson is a salutary one. Of course, you don't have to hear it; you can go on dreaming. Dreaming for example of the harmony between men and women, as we do every day.

You define paganism as the place of the same, in contrast to which Christianity, according to you, allows for the presence of the other.

Mythology, as it is expressed in Pagan art, is the maximal outspreading of fantasy, that is to say, of projections and identifications, to the extent that the whole cosmos is covered with them. The base of this cosmos of the Ancients is constituted by the four fundamental elements and it is sexualized. Human sameness is massively projected into the order of the world. When we are before this shadowy Thing of Christ, what we can sense here is most certainly the Other, with a capital 0. In other words, something that cannot be reduced to an image, which is no doubt why it was never seen. Here we come back to the Mosaic god, whom it was forbidden to represent. The antique god is always in the world. This world is uncreated and, right from the start, includes the gods, which are objects in the world. The Torah says that God is outside the world, that he is not in the dream that we call reality.

You write that iconoclasm is not only intolerable but impossible, too. The Other, you say, cannot be reduced to an image. And yet Christianity led to a remarkable development of images. It is true of course that there was sometimes iconoclasm - Byzantium, the Reformation, Calvinism.

Jewish religion instilled Christianity with a deep distrust of images and idols. Reading the prophets, one is struck by the violence with which they inveigh against idols. It is admirable literature. This is not an aesthetic, an art-historical question, it's a question of ethics-of sexual ethics, I might even say. In images, the prophets saw the fundamental connection that there is between sacrificial violence and human desire. They are constantly opposed to idolatry. And in vain, too, because the Israelites were constantly lapsing back into it. God has to keep beating them about the neck to make them come back to the straight and narrow. What the prophets saw so clearly was the connection between the representation of the sacred, sexuality and the sacrifices that this representation demanded of man. The nature of the problem changes radically with the appearance of an embodied God on the scene of the sacred. Because the image-that is to say, the surface of the body, which is imaginary since it has only an empirical reality, is an image right from the outset-is authorized by the dogma of incarnation, then it can be reproduced. The result is 2,000 years of the most incredible flowering of images in the history of humanity.

Between the very strong temptation of idolatry, which still haunts contemporary history under the name of ethnic groups, territories, roots and nations, and the other temptation which says that the only way of getting rid of these problems of sacrifice is to get rid of images altogether, Christianity chose the middle way, in which the image is not an idol but an icon. Now, the function of the icon is to get away from the representation of the same in order to represent the Other, an Other that no longer demands a scapegoat.

Translation by Charles Penwarden

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