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THE B IBLE AND CRITICAL THEORY ARTICLES Uncanny Bodies, Impossible Knowledge and Somatic Excess in Isaiah 29 Rhiannon Graybill, University of California, Berkeley This essay1 explores affect and somatic excess in Isaiah 29.9-16. I argue that the text presents the male body as a site of resistance to signification and linguistic representation. In this non-signifying body, affect, sensation, and experience are of foremost importance. This emphasis on sensation destabilises both the representational economy of the text and the gendered associations upon which this economy depends. Rejecting the association of the masculine with rationality, discourse, and representation, Isaiah 29 offers in its place an unstable male body and an uncanny masculinity positioned in the space outside representation. The uncanny male body, rich in affect but resistant to signification, suggests a new way of understanding embodiment and imagining gender in the Prophets. My argument draws upon Brian Massumi’s analysis of affect in Parables for the Virtual, Luce Irigaray’s work on gender and language, and Sigmund Freud’s classic essay on the uncanny. 1. INTRODUCTION The words of the prophet Isaiah have strange things to say about the body. In chapter 29 of the book that bears his name, Isaiah commands his listeners to “stupefy yourselves and be stupefied; close your eyes tight and be blind!” (29.9). 2 In the next seven verses, a radical erasure of knowledge and subversion of meaning ensues. The body – the eyes that see, the ears that hear, the very state of wakefulness that makes understanding possible – is replaced with un-sensing, unknowing flesh. The transformation defamiliarises the body and destabilises the larger economy of representation. This self-stupefied, blinded body is a body whose experience exceeds what is representable in language, including the linguistic metaphors we commonly use when we talk about bodies. What is the meaning of such a body, and how can it be represented? This essay considers the non-signifying, excessive bodies of Isaiah 29. I will argue that the body in Isaiah 29.9-16 presents a site of resistance to signification. The representation of embodiment works to destabilise the representational economy of the text. While this instability is ultimately resolved, it nevertheless marks a point of disturbance and reasserts the materiality of prophecy against the smoothness of the literary text. In this non-signifying body, affect, sensation and experience are of foremost importance. The first half of the essay presents a close reading of Isaiah 29.9-16. Building upon Brian Massumi’s work on the affective and non-signifying body, I will consider the problems of sensation and signification in the biblical text. The close reading and analysis in the first half of the essay form the basis for a broader argument in the second half about gender, language and representation. Granting materiality to textual bodies requires, as well, granting them a sex. As an engagement with the work of Luce Irigaray makes clear, the textual economy of Isaiah 29 is a thoroughly masculine space, and the bodies addressed are undoubtedly male bodies. And yet these male bodies are implicated in a radical denial of knowledge and refusal of signification. What happens to masculinity when the masculine economy of THE BIBLE AND CRITICAL THEORY, VOLUME 7, NUMBER 1, 2011 16 THE BIBLE AND CRITICAL THEORY ARTICLES representation falters? As I will demonstrate, when Isaiah 29 pushes the boundaries of representation, masculinity itself is subverted. Freud’s theory of the uncanny provides a helpful form for thinking through this subversive transformation. The uncanny, un-signifying, affective bodies of Isaiah 29 suggest a new way of understanding embodiment and gender in the prophets. The work of Brian Massumi provides a useful starting point for thinking about the body in terms of affect and experience instead of representation and signification. His book Parables for the Virtual opens with a call to move beyond linguistic and positional models of embodiment (Massumi 2002). Massumi argues that a preoccupation with systems, grids of oppositional frameworks (male/female, black/white, gay/straight and so on), and Saussurian/Lacanian coding have displaced the moving, sensing body (4). This leaves cultural theory unable to account for movement, change and experience. Parables for the Virtual, which draws frequently on Deleuze and Guattari, is a concerted effort to render experience, sensation and affect “culturally-theoretically thinkable” (4). While Parables for the Virtual contains a number of provocative theoretical insights, it is the discussion of affect that is most useful for thinking about embodiment in Isaiah. Massumi argues that bodily experience entails an affective excess that exceeds language and linguistic structure. This body exterior to signification is the body I will take up in Isaiah 29. The second half of this essay will set Massumi’s work on affect against two perhaps unexpected interlocutors – Luce Irigaray’s work on gender and language and Freud’s writing on the uncanny. I am less interested in the intricacies of the relationships of each of these texts to one another (Irigaray’s relation to Freud, for example, is a topic that has filled entire books), than in how, together, they offer a new way of thinking about bodies in Isaiah. Indeed, before speaking further about Irigaray's analysis of the masculine economy of representation and Freud's theorisation of the uncanny, I want to turn to the text itself, Isaiah 29.9-16, and its excessive, affective bodies. 2. THE BODY AGAINST ITSELF: ISAIAH 29.9 Isaiah 29.9-16 consists of three poetic couplets (9-10, 13-14, 15-16), as well as a two verse prose interlude (11-12). 3 The couplets and the prose verses form a literary whole, linked by the thematisation of ignorance and knowledge, the images of concealment, and the insistent interest in material bodies and objects. The text reads, 9 Stupefy4 yourselves and be stupefied5; seal your eyes tight and be blind. Be drunk, but not from wine; tremble, but not from strong drink. 10For Yahweh has poured out a spirit of deep sleep upon you, And he has closed your eyes and covered your heads.6 11And the vision, all of it, has become for you like the words of a sealed book.7 If they give it to someone who knows how to read8, saying, “Read this”, then he will say, “I can’t, because it’s sealed”. 12And if he gives the book to someone who can’t read, saying, “Read this”, then he will say, “I don’t know how to read”. 13Because this people approached me with their9 mouths, and honoured me with their lips, But alienated their hearts from me, and their fear of me is a commandment learned by rote. 14Look, I will act yet more marvellously with this people, marvellously and wondrously, So that the wisdom of their wise men is destroyed, and the discernment of their discerning men shall disappear. THE BIBLE AND CRITICAL THEORY, VOLUME 7, NUMBER 1, 2011 17 THE BIBLE AND CRITICAL THEORY ARTICLES 15Woe to the ones who bury plans deeply to hide them from Yahweh, And, because they act in darkness, say to themselves, “Who can see us?” and “Who can know about us?” 16You’re so perverse! It’s as if the potter were the same as the clay, As if the object were to say of its maker, “He didn’t make me”, Or if the pot were to say of its potter, “He has no skill”. Affect and experience challenge the primacy of both language and vision. The body is positioned against knowledge, beginning with the command “stupefy yourselves and be stupefied”. This command to stupefy conceals a paradox. For the imperative to succeed requires a rational subject of address, or at least a subject who understands language, to enact the command. However, this rational subject is also the object: “stupefy yourselves”. The success of the action undoes the very conditions of awareness that make it possible. The text simultaneously destabilises speech and suggests, as Massumi’s work does, the possibility of a bodily experience not reducible to language. In the second half of the verse, the denial of understanding becomes explicitly somatic with the command “seal your eyes tight and be blind”. The verb š‛‛, blind, carries the more graphic meaning of pasting something shut10 – here, one’s eyes. This is a powerful figure for self-inflicted ignorance and a harsh judgment. As in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, the scene of self-blinding in Isaiah offers a vision of excess. There is a moment of horror when Oedipus blinds himself that exceeds the ethical and literary system that surrounds it. Perhaps this is why the dreadful act, like so many acts of violence in Greek drama, occurs offstage.11 I am not suggesting that blindness in Isaiah serves the same function as in the Oedipus cycle, still less that the poetics of biblical and Greek texts are the same (Erich Auerbach [1946] has persuasively demonstrated that they are not). 12 Instead, I want only to draw attention to a certain horror latent in Isaiah, a horror that Sophocles develops more fully. This is a horror that finds somatic form in the scene of self-blinding, an action by – and against – the body that expresses what language alone cannot say. In Isaiah as in Oedipus, the action of bodies moves beyond the basic idea of the body as signifier that underlies much contemporary discourse.13 Returning to Isaiah 29.9, the crisis of the senses – in this case, sight – cannot be explained or integrated into the logic of signification. There is no compensatory wisdom that accompanies the loss of vision, just as there is no tragic catharsis in the moment of self-blinding.

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