Keywords
Mothers
Hagar
Sorentino
Auerbach
How to Cite
Abstract
“The Bible is itself a political battlefield.”[1] Gil Anidjar writes this apropos of the distance between the exuberance and chaos of the Bible when considered alongside the systematic and mathematical precision of ancient Greece. One suspects that Anidjar has in mind the comparison drawn by Erich Auerbach in the opening pages of Mimesis between Homer and the Elohist (viz., the Greek and the Hebrew). In the former, all is present, illuminated, explicit; in the latter, all is past and future, shrouded, implicit.[2] Auerbach infamously argues that it is from the biblical Elohist, not Homer, that the spirit of Western literature descends. (So, too, the very idea of history, but I am getting ahead of myself.) Indeed, Anidjar mentions (but does not cite) Auerbach on the very next page (27) of his short but dense On the Sovereignty of Mothers. The passing reference to Auerbach, and more specifically to Auerbach’s theory of “figuration,” is worth dwelling on. For when it comes to the biblical-political battlefield, much depends on what one understands by figuration, or figural interpretation—indeed figura itself—to say nothing of the figures of Sarah and Hagar, the mother and the slave.
[1] Gil Anidjar, On the Sovereignty of Mothers: The Political as Maternal (New York: Columbia University Press, 2024), 26. All references to this text will be cited hereafter in the body of the essay.
[2] See Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. William R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 3-23.
References
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