Habeas Corpus

You Must Have the Body.

Habeas Corpus.

One of the tenets of our judicial system.

But we live in a culture that increasingly denies the body. It denies it pleasure. It denies it autonomy. It offers to it suffering.

What if God had a body that could suffer?

Elaine Scarry's book, The Body in Pain is a philosophical meditation on what pain does to knowledge and to truth and to one's sense of oneself as human.
She begins with the Judeo-Christian God's lack of body. Yes, of course, in the New Testament, God does have a body in the form of Jesus Christ. And there's a hell of a lot of suffering that gets inflicted on that body. And furthermore, there has been a tremendous amount of theological argument about whether the body of Jesus was ever fully human. In the Old Testament, God does not have a body. And what's more, the Second Commandment specifically commands that humans not dare to imagine what that body might look like-at least not by making graven images of it.

What does it mean that God does not have a body? To quote Scarry:

But to have no body is to have no limits on one's extension out into the world; conversely, to have a body, a body made emphatic by being continually altered through various forms of creation, instruction (e.g., bodily cleansing), and wounding, is to have one's sphere of extension contracted down to the small circle of one's immediate physical presence. Consequently, to be intensely embodied is the equivalent of being unrepresented and (here as in many secular contexts) is almost always the condition of those without power.

I want to repeat that sentence: "Consequently, to be intensely embodied is the equivalent of being unrepresented and (here as in many secular contexts) is almost always the condition of those without power."

Torture makes the world small. Torture makes the world the limits of the body. It makes the body the world. Pain becomes everything. What is truth when one is suffering?

In other words, to be represented by a body is to be finite, to be less powerful, to be controllable. It is not the suffering of Christ that is offered by the right wing as the source of their politics. If it were, their politics would be more compassionate, would recognize the body as the source of pleasure but also of pain. Instead, they make references to the Old Testament, to Sodom and Gomorrah, to Leviticus, to all the parts of the Bible where God seems to punish humans for simply being human.

It is the God of Sodom and Gomorrah who looks down on Guantanamo. It is the God of the Book of Lamentations who watches the extraordinary rendition of prisoners. It is that God that those who fear the terrorists call down upon their enemies. This "Christian" nation does not look to the loving, suffering Christ as its redeemer and saviour. Instead, it looks to the vengeful God who smote the enemies.

Those in power who defend torture want to play that God. They want to usurp that power for themselves. Theirs is not a suffering God. They have the sense of their own power, which is not derived from having suffered; it is precisely because they are untouched by the suffering of others that they call themselves powerful. There is no compassion there. There is no "shared suffering."

I feel like Cassandra. I have hammered away at the same point, over and over again. It is about bodies and the politics of the flesh. It is about how those who torture are also those who would deny a woman her right to choose. Or deny a gay couple their right to love. Or deny a man his right to terminate his life when his suffering became too much to bear.

So much of what I write about comes back to the body. It is the topic I cannot stay away from. It is the source of my politics. It is the source of my art. It cannot be separated from my brain. I am not a Cartesian. It's not just that I think; it's that I feel, and I touch, taste, smell. It's that I have orgasms, that I know the touch of flesh on flesh. It is that I have felt a baby pass through my birth canal, have felt the stirring of life within me. It is that I have been penetrated by another human being. It is that I have experienced pain. It is that I have looked at my body and seen a reflection of imperfection that I wanted to fix, and in seeing that, I have starved it, purged it, wished it different. And so, having been so much an inhabitant of my body, that I declare that bodies are the site of resistance

But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

Eve didn't give humanity sin. She gave humanity knowledge. And God's punishment for that had been like something handed out by an angry father. “How dare you speak back to me. How dare you question my authority. I will make you sorry that you were ever born.”

Not only that, Eve becomes aware that she has a body, and in that awareness, a whole other world of sensory experience is opened up to her. Think about it: What does the term “to know someone biblically” mean?

As Scarry writes:

Part of the knowledge that comes with eating of the tree of good and evil is that they stand, without protest, as creatures with bodies in the presence of one who has no body. It is crucial that these two be said together: the problematic knowledge is not that man has a body; the problematic knowledge is not that God has no body; the problematic knowledge is that man has a body and God has no body-that is, that the unfathomable difference in power between them in part depends on this difference in embodiness … their awareness of the body will soon be correspondingly be heightened: the body is made a permanently preoccupying category in the pain of childbirth, the pain of work required to bring forth food…

And so, God places a curse on Eve and Adam's bodies. He makes it that they will die. He curses women to bring forth children in pain. He makes their bodies the source of suffering. He makes the fact that God has an urepresentable body and humans have a body the source of suffering, of separation, of pain.

It is that God who girds the loins of those who vote to torture. But their votes were predictable: they would control all of our bodies. They hate privacy. They think that none of us are entitled to it. They start with the terrorists. But they will not stop there.

Bookmark/Search this post with:

| | | | |