 | | split opened two millennia ago by the ideological victory over one part of the inhabited world of the Christian conception of carnal relation and of carnal filiationas separate from spiritual life and devalued in relation to it.
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| | (Mopsik 1989, 49)
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Perhaps the most arresting fact about the discourse of sexuality throughout the talmudic literature is that desire is nearly always concatenated with having children. We will see this well illustrated in the texts cited below in Chapter 4, where always, "improper" sexual activity is related to the production of improper children, while proper sexual behavior and intimacy produce children beautiful in body and spirit. Indeed, "procreation" [Hebrew
piriya uriviya
] is often used as a synonym for sexuality itself. We in "our'' culture
9
are quick to read this concatenation as a contamination, a devaluing of sexuality, as if it were a purely instrumental approach to the body. We readily read this view as repressive vis-à-vis Eros itself, partly because we easily associate it with the medieval church doctrine that sex is essentially sinful and is only redeemed by procreation (Gardella 1985, 10). In fact, I suggest, our reading of this connection needs to be studied anthropologically, denaturalized and accounted for. I agree with Mopsik that we reinscribe on the desiring body the very split between the carnal and the spiritual that determines our sense of the body. Mopsik's brilliant insight here makes two points. The first is that in modern culture we tend strongly to separate the functions of sexual pleasure and procreation, constructing them as, in effect, two bodies. The second point is more complex (and more directly related to the thesis of this book). It is that the split we make between desire and procreation is the continuance of the split between flesh and spirit for which Christianity was the vehicle of achieving hegemony in the West.
10
This equation is not obvious at all, for our dualism of the two bodies is ostensibly produced as the agency of a sexual liberation, as a valorization of pleasure as opposed to its utilitarian aims, while the "Christian" split is precisely both
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| | 9. I am using "our culture" here in a sense very similar to that of Mauss (1979) throughout his work, to refer to that generic European (Western European) formation. See also, "But there may be another reason that it is so gratifying for
us
to define the relationship between sex and power in terms of repression" (Foucault 1980, 6; emphasis added).
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| | 10. The reader will note that throughout my book, I have not attributed the origin of the split, but merely its propagation, to Christianity.
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