Near the end of her essay “Wyschogrod’s Hand: Saints,

Animality, and the Labor of Love,” Virginia Burrus writes,

I would suggest … that saints are the monsters among us

animals—ominous portents, oversaturated signs, abysses of

meaning. We point at them and they point us beyond

ourselves. As Wyschogrod puts it, the saint’s task is both

“to construct a content, necessarily extreme, … to reach for

what is inherently refractory to representation,” and “to

‘show’ unrepresentability itself…. 1

I want, here, to point at saintly monsters, and to

gaze in the direction at which they are pointing.

Etymologically, monsters both warn us away and demand our

gaze.2 Being (made) monstrous, they are bodies made for

seeing. Placed in the monstrance, the transfigured host

commands attention, sometimes continuous and adoring

attention. The monstrance positions the body, however unlike

a body it looks, for a central display. Most monstration is

more marginal, and indeed we may know monsters because we

1 Virginia Burrus, "Wyschogrod's Hand: Saints, Animality, and theLabor of Love," in Philosophy Today, 55:4 (November 2011), 412-21,at 419.2 De-monstrare, root monstrare, to point out, indicate, frommonstrum, divine omen or wonder; monstrum root of monster, rootmonare, warn.

1

stare at them from the corners of our eyes, trying not to be

caught in the act of looking, trying not to embarrass

ourselves or to humiliate those upon whom we want to gaze.

Something about these strange bodies, maybe

everything, is a little out of bodily place. Such a body may

have wrong parts: a human body with fangs or fur or the

hindquarters of a horse, a reptile body to enormous scale

and equipped with wings. A monster may be misproportioned.

But perhaps its most significant strangeness is that it

shows us, reminds us, of a coincidence of margin and heart

that we can encounter, but cannot ever quite understand. By

this puzzle and paradox, our urge to know is insistently

pulled, and we keep looking, whether or not we think that we

should.

Behold, the monster shows us a mystery.

Classically, mysteries are secrets. The mysterion may be

text or doctrine or, more commonly, rite. What characterizes

it is not genre but esotericism: it is not to be revealed to

the uninitiated. The mystery is what is secret, and its

revelation is forbidden. We, most of us, are not supposed to

look, and so we want to.

In the Symposium, Plato deepens the meaning of mystery.

After laying out the lesser mysteries of love, Diotima

teasingly remarks, “Even you, Socrates, could probably come

to be initiated into these rites of love. But as for the

purpose of these rites when they are done correctly—that is

2

the final and highest mystery, and I don’t know if you are

capable of it” (210A).3 She then leads him, and us, through

the ascent from lust for a single beautiful body to

philosophia itself. Yet Socrates in his Diatomic drag

surprises us by going beyond the love of wisdom to a higher

or better object still, one that in the perfect simplicity

of its beauty eludes exact description (211A-211D). From

that which is guarded from telling by the constraints of

rite and rule, the mystery of divinity becomes that which is

guarded from telling by impossibility itself, by the limits

of our very language and even of our capacity to experience.

As soon as we know that we can’t or shouldn't say,

as soon as we learn not to look, we want to do exactly that.

In his exhortation to the Greeks, Clement of Alexandria

extensively describes and condemns the practices of non-

Christian mystery cults. Knowing full well that he isn’t

supposed to discuss these mysteries, he declares defiantly

that he shall “thoroughly lay [them] bare” and “display

them” for “spectators of the truth.”4 He will “tell openly

the secret things” (EGII). Having done so, he immediately

goes on to compare these mysteries to orgies, in both the

3 Plato, Symposium, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1989)4 Exhortation to the Greeks,http://www.theoi.com/Text/ClementExhortation1.html; a similarexhortation occurs in the first two books of the Exhortation to theHeathens.

3

sexual and the more broadly frenzied sense.5 Lest we assume

that the rites are purely symbolic, Clement assures us that

“when night is for those who are being initiated a

temptation to licentiousness, talk abounds, and the torch-

fires convict unbridled passions.” (EGII).

Why else, the accusers seem to wonder, would the

practices be kept secret, if not because they are shameful?

The famous chronicler of heresies Irenaeus accuses several

of the Christians he calls heretics both of excessive

secrecy and of varied licentiousness. His invective against

the Valentinians is exemplary: they “yield themselves up to

the lusts of the flesh with the utmost greediness…” (AH,

1.6.3.5), and “are in the habit of defiling those women to

whom they have taught the doctrine…,” or “…having become

5 Continuing in Exhortation to the Greeks: Demeter provides particularlyvivid examples, as her mysteries commemorate her “amorousembraces” with her son Zeus, “on account of which she is said tohave received the name Brimo (the Terrible One); also thesupplications of Zeus, the drink of bile, the tearing out theheart of the victims, and unspeakable obscenities.” If notappalling, these rituals are laughable: “If I go on further toquote the symbols of initiation into this mystery they will, Iknow, move you to laughter....” (II) While Demeter mourns theloss of her daughter, a woman called “Baubo, having receivedDemeter as a guest, offers her a draught of wine and meal. Shedeclines to take it, …on account of her mourning. Baubo is deeplyhurt, thinking she has been slighted, and thereupon uncovers hersecret parts and exhibits them to the goddess.” Note here an intriguing reversibility—display can shame, but itcan insult as well. It's hard, however, to insult a goddess:“Demeter is pleased at the sight, and now at least receives thedraught, – delighted by the spectacle! These are the secretmysteries of the Athenians!” (II).

4

passionately attached to certain women seduce them away from

their husbands, and contract marriages of their own with

them” (ibid.)

It is hard to tell, sometimes, if what infuriates the

opponents of “heresy” is a particular practice or just the

fact that it is hidden. In a quite remarkable passage, again

on the Valentinians, Tertullian writes,

These individuals care about nothing more than to conceal

what they teach--if indeed anyone who conceals can be said

to teach. Their duty of guardianship is a duty brought on by

their guilty consciences. … Consequently the mystagogues

make entry difficult and perform long initiation rites

before they accept the devotee; they put him on probation

for five years in order to increase his anticipation by

suspense and in this manner cause the awesomeness of their

rites to match the desire which has been elicited. Their

duty of secrecy is a natural consequence; they guard closely

what they are finally to reveal. Then--the entire godhead of

the sanctuary, the object of devoted sighs, the secret

signed on all tongues: the image of a penis.6

The Valentinians seem in fact to have been mildly

ascetic, deeply literate, and carefully Christian. But these

6 Tertullian “Tertulliani Adversus Valentinianos,” Translationby Mark T. Riley, 1971, in Gnostic society library, athttp://gnosis.org/library/ter_val_riley.htm

5

facts have little power against the notion that they worship

the image of a penis, the object of desire cultivated and

intensified by prolonged anticipation. Somehow alive,

detached from the rest of the body, the penis presents a

monstrous picture: no wonder, Tertullian implies, that its

pitiful obscenity is kept so long concealed.

The accused, these early defenders of Christian

orthodoxy suggest, both conceal and reveal too much. They

conflate two senses of the forbidden—the naughty with the

secret—and then conflate both with the truly unknowable

divine mystery. I want to suggest, however, that seeking the

unknowable through the forbidden is not a fallacious

conflation, but a mystical approach—particularly where

mysticism is at its most incarnational. The sense that the

body itself is mysterious, that it is or has or harbors

secrets, draws some Christian practitioners into spectacular

acts that may come closer to some senses or forms of

forbidden practice than the accused groups ever came. It

draws them, particularly, into practices most strangely

related to others' stares. Here are the tropes of popular

monstrous humans: blood poured out and eagerly drunk,

evoking vampires; bodies covered in hair, like werewolves;

the dead who live again, like zombies.

The desire to draw others’ gazes, particularly upon

what could or should marginalize or shame, is found

6

especially in ascetic practices of humiliation.7

Humiliation is not the same as humility, though

(particularly within monasticism) the latter may include the

capacity—usually acquired in a difficult habituation—to

withstand humiliating acts, on the model of the supreme

humiliation of a God tortured and executed as a criminal, or

the more approachable model of Paul, who took "pleasure in

infirmities, in insults, in persecutions.”8 Monastic

habituation to humiliation could be fabulously challenging,

but once truly acquired, humility might not require much

effort, unless the humiliating other is highly creative. I

have long thought that Nietzsche was right about at least

some aspects of the ascetic will: it is strong and easily

bored. No doubt most of those in monastic communities

endured humiliation reluctantly and for the sake of humility

—but there are others, and not only monks, who have sought

it for its own sake, whether or not they thus labeled it.

They have sought humiliation as a sign of the depths of

their humility and more—in their pleasure in insults, in

persecutions. They make us look, and wonder.

Hagiographies and popular stories of these ascetics,

many of whom become saints, often emphasize their 7 Including those of the “holy fools,” who, like the Cynicsbefore them, make strong yet subtle statements in their nudityand filth. (this, like note 5, is really a reminder to myself forexpansion.)8 John Chrysostom, in "Homily Addressed to the People of Antioch,Concerning the Statues," athttp://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf109.xix.iii.html

7

attractiveness. In some instances, it is even read as a sign

of God's goodness,9 but for most, matters are less neatly

aligned. In their youth, many of these future saints enjoy

beauty and the attention that it brings. In the 17th

century, St. Veronica Giuliani notes in her autobiography

that she enjoyed public display of her beauty, and enjoyed

the mask-wearing and cross-dressing considered quite sexy in

her day10—“With this transvestism,” she declares, “I was

enormously satisfied; it made me noticed by more people."11

Likewise pleased with her own youthful beauty is Margaret of

Cortona, a 13th century Franciscan tertiary who later

becomes conspicuous instead in her asceticism.12 Those who

are not especially pretty, such as Catherine of Siena, still

learn to adorn their faces and dye their hair, or dress to

impress and delight.

More professionally attentive to her appearance is

Pelagia of Antioch, one of the “holy harlots” whom Burrus

discusses vividly in The Sex Lives of Saints. Pelagia’s

biographer, the deacon Jacob, not only specifies many

details of her clothing, but emphasizes her attractive 9 When the future ascetic known as Pelagia first appears as astunningly beautiful actress, for instance, the local bishopbelieves that “the woman’s ‘carnal beauty’…is the manifestationof her actual spiritual power.” Virginia Burrus, The Sex Lives ofSaints: An Erotics of Ancient Hagiography (Philadelphia: University ofPennsylvania Press, 2004), 141. 10 Rudloph Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1987), 67. 11 Bell, 67. Citations from 1st version of autobiography, 5:17).12 Bell, 96.

8

power: “Thus it was that her beauty and finery lured

everyone who saw her to stare at her and at her

appearance.”13 Even the bishop, Nonnos, is impressed, and he

urges the other monks to be impressed too: “To be honest,

fathers, did not the beauty of this prostitute who passed in

front of us astonish you?”14 An intensely focused

attentiveness to the flesh as it appears, as it is visible,

is vital in all these instances; beauty may not be necessary

to it, but does undoubtedly prove useful in enticing that

initial awareness.

Even those who enjoy their beauty early on, however,

come to regard it more warily later. Catherine eagerly cuts

her bleached blonde hair to the roots as a sign of her

religious devotion. 15 Others go further--the 15th century

Franciscan nun Eustochia burned her face and discolored it

with herbs.16 When Jacob is sent by his bishop, after many

years, to see Pelagia in the desert, he does not know who 13 Burrus, Sex Lives, 139. Citing Life of Pelagia, 5.14 Burrus, Sex Lives, 140. Citing Life of Pelagia, 7.15 The Sisters of Penance respond with caution to Catherine’smother’s petition that she be allowed to join, finally agreeingthat they will see her and allow her entrance only if she is nottoo pretty. (As by that time Catherine had had disfiguring pox,she was not at great risk of this (Bell, 45).) Catherine herselfis eager by then to be rid of adornment. When she persuades thepriest of the sincerity of her religious vows, he answers that ifshe is truly serious, she should cut off all of her bleachedblonde hair. She jubilantly hacks it to the roots (Bell, 41). 16 Geronima Vaccari and Cecilia de Ansalono, La leggenda della beataEustochia da Messina, Testo volgare del sec. XV restituito all’ originaria lezione, 2nd

ed., Michele Catalono (Messina, 1975), 74-76. Cited thus in Bell,143.

9

she is. “Her astounding beauty had all faded away, her

laughing and bright face that I had known had become ugly,

her pretty eyes had become hollow and cavernous as a result

of much fasting….”17 Her asceticism has won out over her

beauty. Ascetic women resist beauty as a temptation to pride

and a sign of attention to wordly matters, even as their

biographers insistently point it out.

One’s own shame and pride are not the only risks of

being beautiful—beauty may also arouse the desire of others.

Late in the 16th century, Rose of Lima “became afraid that

her beauty might be a temptation to someone, since people

could not take their eyes off her. Therefore, she rubbed her

face with pepper until it was all red and blistered.”18

Margaret of Cortona outgrew her youthful delight in

appearance, and wished to cut her nose and lips with a

razor, “because with the beauty of my face I did harm to

many souls. Therefore, [I wish] to do justice upon myself,

by myself, for this offense to God and to transform the

beauty of my body into ugliness….”19Appearing with the

balanced propriety of beauty, these bodies become monstrous

by their power to entice the attention of others, and so

they must be marked as monsters, made to warn of the dangers

implicit in that at which we are drawn to stare.

17 Burrus, Sex Lives, 144. PCM notes how weird gender gets here.18 <http://www.catholic.org/saints/saint.php?saint_id=446>19 Bell, 99. Citing Antica leggenda 2:15.

10

Beauty is often bared. Angela of Foligno is

particularly striking here: in a famous vignette, she strips

entirely before a church’s crucifix and offers herself to

Christ. Mary of Egypt, centuries earlier, had been

beautifully ornamented in her youth, but later she wanders

the desert clad only in her own long hair, a sort of saintly

Godiva—or werewoman. Her hair seems to preserve some measure

of her modesty, providing the concealment that the eager

monk Zosimas will refuse to her speech, as he asks her an

entire biography’s worth of questions, attempting to draw

into words some truth deeper than the skin. If Mary's body

isn't naked enough, perhaps her psyche can be.20

In Saving Shame, Burrus recounts a story strikingly

reminiscent of a popular trope in present-day humiliation

pornography, in which the monk Serapion "tests" the humility

of a virginal devotee to God by insisting first that she

appear in public, then that she disrobe and walk through the

city. "When she protests that others will think her 'insane

and demon-ridden,' he asks why she should care… [and]

translates her apparent modesty into a manifestation of

pride, claiming that she considers herself 'more pious than

others'…" (37.16).21

20 Burrus, Sex Lives, 151, notes how determined this drawing-outbecomes: "At this point, the woman begs to be allowed to end hershameful narrative, lest Zosimas himself be corrupted.Fortunately for him, it is too late. ‘Speak, my mother, in thename of the Lord,’ he cries out desperately.”21 Burrus, Saving Shame, 92.

11

Others more deliberately seek public exposure. Our

Margaret, no longer so beautiful, gains notice for “the

exceptional humility with which she shouted out publically

her sins.” But shouting is not quite enough. Wearing “a cord

tied around her neck in place of the jewelry she once had

worn,” she asks public forgiveness during the Sunday mass.

“Had her confessor not refused to allow it …. Her wish was

to be led around blindfolded by a woman who should cry out:

‘“Here is Margaret, dear citizens! Here is she who once

carried herself with such airs, and with her vanity and bad

example did so much harm to the souls in this town!" Thus,”

she says, “I will be deemed crazy by those before whom I

boasted with my words and my looks.’”22 A similar story

appears in Angela’s account of her own life: “I even enjoyed

imagining how I could make public my iniquities,

hypocrisies, and sins. I wanted to parade naked through

towns and public squares with pieces of meat and fish

hanging from my neck and to proclaim: ‘Behold the lowest of

women, full of malice and deceit, stinking with every vice

and evil.’”23

This nakedness is a deliberate dispossession and

renunciation, less of objects—that is, clothing—than of a

state of self-containment. It is the loss of a boundary, and

22 Bell, 96. Citing Antica leggenda della vita e de’ miracoli di s. Margherita diCortona scritta dal di lei confessore Fr. Giunta Bevegnati, ed. Lodovico daPelago, (Lucca, 1793) 2:14; 4:2; 8:4.23 Angela of Foligno: Complete Works, trans. Paul Lachance andRomana Guarnieri (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1993), 219.

12

a literal revelation. By it some small secret is told, some

loss of isolation endured. This loss is particularly that of

unknowness, of not being exposed. Such stripped-down

asceticism seeks some truth of corporeality—a truth that

sustains the will to know precisely by being unfindable. Yet

the will seeks, staring at the body stripped to the skin.

Those hungry for humiliation seek the secret too, even if

they are blindfolded--this gaze is not unidirectional, of

which I shall shortly say more.

Those paying even the least attention have undoubtedly

registered the potent element of abjection—displacement,

filth, boundary loss--in these humiliations. In Pelagia's

tale, this becomes explicit: she soaks the bishop's feet

with her tears, wiping the dirt onto herself. She calls

herself debased and debasing names: a "ravenous vulture” [a

carrion eater, a consumer of rot]. "A disgusting stone on

which people have tripped up"--but upon which they must

first be walking, with those dirty feet. "A deep ditch of

mire," which scarcely requires elaboration. "O I am a

destructive moth," she says, "and I have gnawed into many

bodies," feeding upon the flesh not meant for food; "I am an

abyss of evils." She then begs the bishop to strip her of

her dirty clothing, so that she may be redressed for

baptism.24 It is a scene, as Burrus rightly notes, so loaded

with abject terms that it risks self-parody.

24 Burrus, Sex Lives, 142.

13

And yet that desire to know, to see the secret beneath

the skin, the mystery behind the image of the penis, is

unsatisfied. Humiliation may intrude more deeply: we also

find a deeper stripping, or an opening, of the skin itself.

Margaret of Cortona sought permission to slash her face;

Eustochia's blisters make smaller but painful openings. The

humiliations of martyrdom open wounds or even cut off body

parts.25 (Though it is not my focus here, it is worth

noting that more overtly sexual or pornographic depictions

of humiliation focus frequently upon the body’s orifices—not

always the expected ones--and upon opening them as widely as

possible.) [note: in the presentation, the image here is of

a nostril hook in use]

Bodily fluids may also cross boundaries, both

physical and social. The fourth-century saint Thaïs is

portrayed in her Vita as an unusually desirable Egyptian

courtesan. When a suspicious monk visits her to see who has

caused so much quarrel and bloodshed among those seeking her

favors, he asks if she does not fear for her soul, “as well

as those of the young men she has led to damnation.”

Suddenly overwhelmed, Thaïs begs the monk for a suitable

penance. Obligingly, he burns all of her goods and seals her

into a small monastic cell, “and when she asks the monk

25 Among others, Burrus cites Elfpidius, who "reached such a highdegree of mortification and so wasted away his body that the sunshone through his bones" (48.3), not opening the body to touch,but revealing its interior to those who gaze at it in the light(Saving Shame, 87).

14

where she is to urinate he charitably responds, 'In the

cell, as you deserve.'" Thaïs accepts this and further

humiliation. After three years, the monk himself seeks

advice from St. Antony, and in a vision, learns that Thaïs

has been forgiven. Taken from her cell, she dies in about

two weeks.26

Of course, saintly bodies sometimes open or exude of

their own accord—or in unexpectedly beneficial ways. Mary of

Egypt’s modesty may be protected by her hair; that of the

third century Roman Anastasia is more unexpectedly veiled.

Under torture, she praises God. “When they stripped her

naked, to humiliate her, she cried to the judge: 'Whip me

and cut at me and beat me; my naked body will be hidden by

wounds, and my shame will be covered by my blood!' She was

whipped and beaten and cut about….Then her breasts and

tongue were cut off. ... She was finally beheaded with the

sword outside the city.” Here the display of the flesh is

covered by what is more commonly covered and held in, kept

concealed, by that flesh, the blood from the newly opened

wounds, even as the body is wounded again to the point of

dismemberment.27

Bodies, and particularly bodily fluids, may cross from

one to another with or without wounds. In later versions of

her autobiography, Veronica tells a childhood story of

looking at a painting of Mary breastfeeding Jesus. She 26 http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/whthaintro.htm 27 http://orthodoxwiki.org/Anastasia_the_Roman

15

writes, “I began to undress. That done, I took off the

little corset I had and said: ‘My Jesus, leave those

breasts. Come take milk here from me.’ And I offered my

breast. He detached from that of the Virgin and attached to

mine. Oh God! I cannot find words to tell how I felt... At

that moment the Babe seemed not painted, but in the

flesh.”28

When the medieval devotions to the Passion and wounds

of Christ emerge, many saints-to-be pay particular attention

to the spear wound in the side, entering into it as a

sheltering space or drinking from it as from the breast.

Catherine of Siena is among those who do both, or wish to;

she envisions entering Christ's body through the wound, and

declares that God "showed me from far away his holy side,

and I cried with great desire to place my lips on the most

sacred wound.”29 She will attempt to fulfill some measure of

this desire by drinking the fluid from the sores of lepers,

themselves both abject and wounded.

As these bodily boundaries blur, other boundaries too

are troubled, most noticeably those of, and between,

subjects. This becomes clearer when we consider

humiliation’s strange reversibilities—particularly that of

the gaze itself.

28 2nd. Rel, 1:2-4; 3rd rel., 5-36-37. 2nd & 3rd autobios from OresteFiorucci, ed., ‘Un Tesoro Nascosto’ ossia diario di S. Veronica Giuliani, 5vols., [Città di Castello, 1969-1974]). Thus in Bell, 60.29 Raymond of Capua, Legenda, 191. Thus in Bell, 30.

16

As optical theory develops, the middle ages take up the

ancient theories of a double emission and penetration of

light to present us with a more “scientifically” grounded

reversibility. Combining the ideas of intromission and

extramission—visual “power” traveling from object to eye or

vice-versa—medieval theorists held that both were true.

Vision is neither purely active nor purely passive; it is an

exchange moving across the between.30 Rather than

maintaining a disinterested aesthetic distance, vision

entails here a double penetration—all the more so before the

flesh. This sense of the dual gaze returns to a considerable

degree in the 20th century with Lacan, for whom gazing (not

simply seeing) is at once anxious and pleasurable, active

and passive: the object of the gaze, without ceasing to be

object, nonetheless gazes back, tells me of my self (it

makes me self-conscious). Lacan associates this reversible

gaze with both the voyeuristic will to see and the

exhibitionistic will to be seen .31The knowledge-demanding

gaze of the one who humiliates, who stares and asks and

demands, seeks to go beyond the limits of vision not only by

invading the known body, but by reversing and thereby

doubling the seeing gaze: seeking the secrets of the bared

30 Thomas F. Glick, Steven John Livesey, Faith Wallis, Medieval

Science, Technology And Medicine: An Encyclopedia, (New York: Routledge,2005), 373-74. 31 Jacques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1981), esp. 181–183.

17

and opened body, the body at the margins rendered abject and

monstrous, the voyeur looks into the heart of the flesh,

seeking out the secrets of his own. Cary Howie and Bill

Burgwinkle write in Sanctity and Pornography in the Middle Ages, “…in

the case of the ecstatic or pornographic body,…we are

encouraged to view the image… using a kind of surgical gaze

that tries to touch the surface or even invade it, all with

the intent of opening up the viewer him- or herself to

potential invasion.” (S&P, 20). But that viewer sees only

that the sought is unseeable; abjection, as Georges Bataille

long ago told us, cannot be seen, any more than it can be

named in description; the flesh continues to conceal its

mysteries. Howie and Burgwinkle explicitly note the

doubleness of seeing, the “medieval sense that visual

penetration always goes both ways.”32 But this penetration

runs into something, no thing, not quite a barrier, not

quite a limit, not even, quite, a deflection, but the non-

visible and unknowable.

Both the one who exhibits, opening the body to

scrutiny, and the one who looks, staring straight or

glancing sideways at the heart, are doing a great many

things, of course, but one thing they are doing is trying,

with the desperation of all impossible desires (which is to

say: with the fervor of all religion) to see and to show. To

see the mystery, to show the secret: to know what cannot be

32 Howie and Burgwinkle, 38.

18

known. The beautiful body attracts the gaze; eager hands

strip it bare; assistive technologies and divine

interventions alike serve to open it up—yet it eludes us.

Writing of Bataille, Maurice Blanchot remarks, “The sacred

is what cannot ultimately be touched, rejoined, repaired or

redeemed.”33 Nor, in this dismemberment and elusion, can it

be seen, or known. The urgent search for revelation is at

once enticed and foreclosed by mystery.

Humiliation as exhibition writes the body large. It

involves a sort of monsterizing, an abjection, pushing to

the margins what nonetheless remains at the heart,

intensifying the gaze. We cannot quite identify humiliation

with shame, but neither can we disentangle the two: shame is

no small component of the affective element of humiliation,

but while shame is, as Eve Sedgewick persuasively argued,

readily and involuntarily shared, humiliation is at its

strongest when it is not shared at all. If the voyeur is

embarrassed and turns away, humiliation is broken. If the

viewer in these instances is ashamed, even just a little

embarrassed, the tensely balanced desire of the one

humiliated is neither satisfied nor sustained. The one

humiliated likewise seeks to know, to find and to share.

“Shame,” as Burrus writes, “does not merely guard the

boundary between the public and the private, the political

and the personal, the inter- and intrasubjective, but also

33 Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come, need page #

19

constantly traverses those boundaries—even very nearly

dissolves them. This traversal—this near-dissolution—binds

shame tightly to the erotic. … the plunge into the abjection

of flesh-and-soul … undoes identity, giving rise to both

wild joy and abysmal humility—courting the arrival of grace"

(SS 152).

We approach, then, another Bataillean construction,

that of communication, which is no simple information

transfer but a bleeding-over at the site of wounds, an

opening so deep as to present a mortal risk to knowledge and

the knowing subject. At times, both the entrapment within

oneself and the distance crucial to the proximity of the

known are too much. The desire to know is too strong. The

impossible pulls.

In the double penetration of the gaze, in the

reversibility of shame, in the enticement of the desire to

know as it is drawn to the unknowable, in the urge to escape

the boundaries of the very self, humiliation is seductive:

it entices without satiation, it is drawn without the

satisfaction of ending. Hagiographic accounts often end

rather startlingly after the body is humiliate or opened

(even if opened and healed) as much as possible: even if an

interval of years is noted, we generally skip straight to

death, where the body itself hovers at the boundary and

begins to leak, becoming itself the abject corpse. (The

zombie, of course, plays upon this particular monstrosity:

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what if the body in its purest materiality, the corpse

itself, without ceasing to hold together, nonetheless lived,

like us, reminding us of how much we too are like it?) There

is no completion. Blanchot links the secret not to death,

but to the impossibility of knowing-dying, as “the

inevitable accomplishment of what is impossible to

accomplish—and this would be dying itself.” (SNB 107, cited

in Massie, 34). But the secret is always in excess—of life,

to be sure, but of dying too. The glory of resurrection and

the horror of the zombie both entice us toward it.

Writing of the re-living of the once dead flesh, not as

a leaking zombie but reconstructed to a perfection beyond

its former unity, Paul declares, “Behold, I show you a

mystery.” But he doesn’t, quite: in the story of these

bodies he shows us, as sanctified glory and abject monsters

show us alike, that a mystery is. We might suspect the

secret of being simply absent—that is, of being a fiction,

indeed a lie. But the absence of the secret is not of a sort

that reduces it; rather, it is at the heart of its presence.

No wonder we are so unsuccessful in pushing it away, in

making it fully marginal. "There is nothing secret,

anywhere;” writes Blanchot, “this is what the secret always

says.- All the while not saying it. For, with the words

'there is' and 'nothing,' the enigma continues to rule,

preventing installation and repose." The secret is more at

home (which is to say: as unsettled and unsettling, as

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enduringly homeless, as marginal and central) in a

thoroughly apophatic theology, in which no thing is God,

than in a simpler positivism. The mystery remains: in our

remains, in our remainder—the site and nonsite of our

abjection, our introjection of otherness, our extrajection

of self, our own impossible divinity. The remainder, a

concept that contemporary theorists have taken up primarily

from Julia Kristeva’s discussion of abjection, is that in

identity and representation which nonetheless eludes them.

As Jacob Rogozinski makes clear, it is particularly that

aspect of myself which is at once constitutive of me and

persistently other than me, that of which I attempt to rid

myself by projection, extrajection—abjection. At the heart

and the center, it attracts us as unknowable; at the limit

and the margin, it repels us in its familiarity, as

intriguing and as horrifying as a seamonster from the

depths.

The elusive form of sanctity removes itself from the

orderliness of classical beauty into a riskier and more

enticing monstrous non-formation. I cannot help wondering if

perhaps this is something like the bizarre forms that

unsettle Augustine’s meditations on the underpinnings of the

beautiful material world. There is, for instance, some

sense of monstrosity--parts mixed and out of place,

proportions off--in the unusual bodies he describes in City

of God, such as those of people with the heads of dogs, or

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no heads at all; or a single eye or leg; or multiple sexes.

He is careful to keep this monstrosity away from the beauty

of glorified bodies, but it slips in a little bit anyway,

and it proves to be strangely difficult to place precise

boundaries on the matter that resurrection incorporates. The

body perfected returns to itself much of the abjected

remainder. Only the monster, it seems, could be perfect.

  The incomprehensibility and discomfort of the oddly

formed or malformed is picked up and in turn trans-formed by

Bataille in his late, appropriately incomplete thoughts on

the informe, which in turn informs Kristeva's reading of

abjection. Related to, yet not quite so simple as that which

is deformed, the informe refuses formation; it will not stay

in place even long enough for us to figure out what it is.

Like the abject, it seems always to be shifting out of the

line of our intellectual—and physical—sight. It seems always

in its elusion to be leading us somewhere—always to be just

on the verge of showing us a mystery.

Such unsettledness characterizes not only abjection,

but the mysterious secret itself, in which our very selfhood

is unsettled. Jacques Derrida links the unsettledness of

secrets to an element of reversibility that will return us

to the ascetics and martyrs. The “secret of secrecy,” he

says is “that it is not a matter of knowing and that it is

there for no-one. A secret doesn’t belong, it can never be

said to be at home or in its place. The question of the

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self: ‘who am I’ not in the sense of ‘who am I”’ but rather

‘who is this “I”’ “ that can say ‘who’? What is the ‘I’ and

what becomes of responsibility once the identity of the ‘I’

trembles in secret?”34 (I should here admit

straightforwardly that I, trembling in secret or not, will

not be addressing that last question today.)

If the secret is that there is no secret, and we know

that, then that there is simply no secret is not the secret—

not, at least, as the secret is mysterious, truly non-

knowable, and not simply knowledge reserved to a few. This

does not mean that there is some thing that is the secret,

whether that thing is a fact or a technique or an object; as

Blanchot reminds us, that there is no-thing is as enigmatic

as any thing can be. It means rather that the secret has the

character of retreat or regression, that it always pulls

further away from the known (and thus beyond or behind those

once-secrets that we have come to know): we cannot track it

down, because its pushed-away abjection at the same time

tugs it more tightly into the heart of ourselves and our

knowledge. Such drawing, I have elsewhere argued, is

characteristic of seduction, a pleasure as much in

enticement as in desire’s satisfaction and death. And

seduction void of stopping point, pulling what can into what

cannot be known, seen, told—pulling together present and

absent—is characteristically divine. 34 Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1995), 92.

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Humiliation in this complexity, so strangely sought out

and caught up in desire, is revelation, a revealing with all

of its theological overtones in place. Hungry for reversible

seeing, touching, knowing, the humiliated and the humiliator

alike seek the truth in repeated query, in stripped bodies,

in opened flesh, in commanded confessions, as if we could

find the mystery in the forbidden publicizing of skin, as if

the interior were somehow a findable secret site, and not

another shifting and changing layer. In this very

elusiveness, however, the humiliated body, always

withdrawing its truth from even the most sadistically or

lasciviously attentive gaze, is a revelation of mystery: not

of the answer to the question, but of the infinite immanence

of the question itself. Saintly monstrosity interrogates us

in the strange displacement of the body and the terrors of

its interior which fail to display the mystery they de-

monstrate.

The monstrosity of all bodies forces our attention to

the forms and objects and sites associated with abjection,

with the shameful and excremental that we would marginalize

or do away with altogether. But we must be careful not to

confuse any object with the abject, with abjection, itself—

not to slip from association and attention to reification.

(In fact, this is a criticism sometimes made of Kristeva's

use of the concept: that she too strongly associates, and so

risks identifying, the genuinely unspeakable abject with the

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merely forbidden, the impure or polluted object.) Abjection

is not a thing that is simply displaced or out of place,

which might yet be returned to propriety, but the troubling

act and instance of the wholly unplaceable, of what refuses

inside or out, of the remainder that is nonetheless the

trace of myself, of my own monstrousness. What we seek to

see or hear in humiliation, through that urgent reversible

double gaze, is not the urine in the cell, the blood on

skin, the shame written, if not on the flesh, at least on a

placard hung around the naked body, or the improbable detail

of an astonishing life. It is, rather, the unplaceable

movement and space of the incarnate mystery. We seek to make

the resistant into the speakable, into the knowable and

properly conceptualizable, not into this irritatingly

slippery confrontation with what eludes us. We gaze avidly,

or avidly draw the gaze, to shame and remnant and the very

interior of the flesh, to the dual interrogations of the

monstrous. Yet only further questions open.

And they open all the way into the heart of the matter

of the world. Neither quite deformed nor simply malformed,

the Bataillean informe threatens the order of forms

themselves, reminds us of how close we may always be to dis-

integration. I cannot help being reminded here of

Augustine’s monstrous imaginings in Book 12 of the

Confessions, in which unformed matter, the first of all

creation, eludes his capacity for images; he imagines,

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rather, monstrous forms. “Was it not you, O Lord, who taught

me that before you fashioned that formless matter into

various forms, there was nothing – no colour, no shape, no

body, no spirit? Yet there was not complete and utter

nothingness: there was this formless matter entirely without

feature” (Confessions 12.3). Augustine’s desperate attempt to

picture this formlessness used to lead, he admits, to

picture images: “I used to picture it to myself in countless

different forms, which means that I did not really picture

it at all, because my mind simply conjured up hideous and

horrible shapes…I took ‘formless’ to mean, not something

entirely without form, but some shape so monstrous and

grotesque that if I were to see it, my senses would recoil

and my human frailty quail before it” (12.6). In the

formless is the possibility of all that can then be created—

but that possibility is too terrifying to be known, to be

registered by our senses.

In matter unordered by form, all parts are dis-placed;

all space becomes betweenness, but there are no stable

subjects and objects to mark the limits of the between. The

lowest becomes the highest. Blanchot writes,

... if base things, actions of which it is not proper to

speak, suddenly impose themselves on us as charged with the

highest value this assertion, the instant it reaches us…

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touches us scandalously, however liberal we may be regarding

what seems degraded or exalted.

The efforts we make to theoretically isolate the point

where scandal touches us (calling, for instance, on what we

know of the sacred, object of desire and horror), are like

the work of blood cells to restore the wounded part. The

body returns to normal, but the experience of the wound

remains. One cures the wound, one cannot cure the essence of

a wound.35 (MB, Book to Come, 190).

The “essence of the wound” is no definable something. It is

the space of a secret, left where non-knowledge might once

have crossed.

It is also, according to Bataille, the site of

communication—which is not of facts, of what can be imparted

and known, but exactly of what can be shared only without

comprehension. The saints opened all the way up share only

mystery.

The secret that there is no secret, drawn to the flesh

that speaks it, twists just enough to reveal the secret that

there are always more secrets. All people by nature desire

to know, but some people perversely desire to have that

desire gratified, and frustrated, and sustained, all at

once. Such people are drawn to mystery. And where a faith is

founded in the joining of word to flesh, its followers may

35 Blanchot, The Book to Come, 190.

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well seek to understand, to comprehend and take hold of, the

murmur of almost-meaning, the whisper of not-quite silence,

in the literalized layers of the body itself. In the play

between the unsayable and the not-to-be-said, between the

unshowable forbidden and the invisible secret, a mystery is

drawn out and it draws us in, in a reversible and no longer

perfectly closable opening. The secret would be lost if it

could be told. Body displayed, flesh broken tells the very

secret that it keeps. It seems to display the divine

corporeal secret for us, setting as in a monstrance the body

we can scarcely recognize. But in fact the secret stays

silent, and the monstration is both attractant and warning

marking the out-of-bounds: here there be mysteries. If

monstrosity is the unsettled, unsettling, always-displacing

strangeness of bodies, then we are all monsters, and

beautiful. We cannot quite look away.

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