Sodomscapes

Lowell Gallagher

Description

Sodomscapes presents a fresh approach to the story of Lot's wife, as it's been read across cultures and generations. In the process, it reinterprets foundational concepts of ethics, representation, and the body. While the sudden mutation of Lot's wife in the flight from Sodom is often read to confirm our antiscopic bias, a rival tradition emphasizes the counterintuitive optics required to nurture sustainable habitations for life in view of its unforeseeable contingency.Whether in medieval exegesis, Russian avant-garde art, Renaissance painting, or today's Dead Sea health care tourism industry, the repeated desire to reclaim Lot's wife turns the cautionary emblem of the mutating woman into a figural laboratory for testing the ethical bounds of hospitality. Sodomscape-the book's name for this gesture-revisits touchstone moments in the history of figural thinking and places them in conversation with key thinkers of hospitality. The book's cumulative perspective identifies Lot's wife as the resilient figure of vigilant dwelling, whose in-betweenness discloses counterintuitive ways of understanding what counts as a life amid divergent claims of being-with and being-for.

Sujets

• Bibles
• Bible

Informations

• Publié par: Fordham University Press
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780823275236
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 27 Mo

Extrait

S o d o m s c a p e s

Sodomscapes Hospitality in the Flesh

Lowell Gallagher

f o r d h a m u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s New York 2017

Copyright © 2017 Fordham University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available online at http://catalog.loc.gov.

Printed in the United States of America 19 18 17 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

This is for my mother,

Bernadette Marie Collette Gallagher (1912 –2014).

May her memory be for a blessing.

To my sister, Alice Osborne.

I carry you in my heart.

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c o n t e n t s

Preface: Entering Sodomscape

Introduction: Figural Moorings of Hospitality in Sodomscape Exodus, Interrupted: Lot’s Wife and the Allegorical Interval The Rise of Prophecy: Figural Neuter, Desert of Allegory Remembering Lot’s Wife: The Structure of Testimony in thePainted Lifeof Mary Ward Avant-Garde Lot’s Wife: Natalia Goncharova’sSalt Pillars and the Rebirth of Hospitality Soundings in Sodomscape: Biblical Purity Codes, Spa Clinics, and the Ends of Immunity The Face of the Contemporary: Lost World Fantasies of Finding Lot’s Wife Out of Africa: Albert Memmi’s Desert of Allegory inThePillar of Salt182

Acknowledgments Notes Index

Color plates follow page 112

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p r e f a c e : e n t e r i n g s o d o m s c a p e

Then the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the Lord out of heaven; and he overthrew those cities, and all the Plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew on the ground. But Lot’s wife, behind him, looked back, and she became a pillar of salt.

1 —gen. 19:24 –26

Mon amie, il faut que je parte. Voulez-vous voir l’endroit sur la carte? C’est un point noir.

En moi, si la chose Bien me réussit, ce sera un point rose dans un vert pays.

I must leave, my dearest. Wouldyouliketosee The spot on the map? It’s a black dot.

Inside me, if things turn out well, there will be a pink dot in a green country.

2 —rainer maria rilke, “Départ”

September 12, 2000, Ein Bokek, Israel. I have arrived at the Dead Sea, in search of Lot’s wife. Things have not turned out well. I had forgotten that the most impor- tant word in Rilke’s poem is the conjunctionif, the indiscriminate and thus always faithful messenger of contingency. The black dot on the map has not become a pink dot in a green country. The legendary image of a mortified landscape is what I expected to find, having apparently forgotten the observation, documented in virtually every travel guide book in recent circulation, that the unusual geological features of the region — the hyper- saline lake and the seven-mile salt ridge called Kashum Usdum — now share space with a sprawling industrial and consumerist complex. A further impediment arose at the time of my visit. Because of structural renovations on the southbound highway along Mount Sedom, the solitary road sign di- recting tourists to the salt pillar had been temporarily removed. Without the visual index, the designated escarpment yielded something I was not looking for. What appeared instead of the fabled remnant was the break- down of a Gestalt principle: nothing less than the dissolution offigure into the blankness of ground.

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