Queer Theory and the Jewish Question by Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, Ann Pellegrini Page B
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entire public systematics of the natural and the unnatural, the pure and the impure. The peculiar strike that the story makes to the heart is that Esther’s small, individual ability to risk losing the love and countenance of her master has the power to save not only her own space in life but her people.
It would not be hard to imagine a version of Esther set in the Supreme Court in the days immediately before the decision in Bowers v. Hardwick . Cast as the ingenue in the title role a hypothetical closeted gay clerk, as As- suérus a hypothetical Justice of the same gender who is about to make a ma- jority of five in support of the Georgia law. The Justice has grown fond of the clerk, oddly fonder than s/he is used to being of clerks, and . . . In our com- pulsive recursions to the question of the sexualities of court personnel, such a scenario was close to the minds of my friends and me in many forms. In the passionate dissenting opinions, were there not the traces of others’ comings- out already performed; could even the dissents themselves represent such per- formances, Justice coming out to Justice? With the blood-let tatters of what risky comings-out achieved and then overridden—friends’, clerks’, employ- ees’, children’s—was the imperious prose of the majority opinions lined? More painful and frequent were thoughts of all the coming out that had not happened, of the women and men who had not in some more modern idiom said, with Esther,
I dare to beg you, both for my own life and the sad days of an ill-fated people
that you have condemned to perish with me.
(1029–31)
What was lost in the absence of such scenes was not, either, the opportu- nity to evoke with eloquence a perhaps demeaning pathos like Esther’s. It was
something much more precious: evocation, articulation, of the dumb As- suérus in all his imperial ineloquent bathos of unknowing: “A périr? Vous? Quel peuple?” (“To perish? You? What people?” [1032]). “What people?” in- deed—why, as it oddly happens, the very people whose eradication he per- sonally is just on the point of effecting. But only with the utterance of these blank syllables, making the weight of Assuérus’s powerful ignorance sudden- ly audible—not least to him—in the same register as the weight of Esther’s and Mardochée’s private knowledge, can any open flow of power become pos- sible. It is here that Aman begins to tremble.
Just so with coming out: it can bring about the revelation of a powerful unknowing as unknowing, not as a vacuum or as the blank it can pretend to be but as a weighty and occupied and consequential epistemological space. Esther’s avowal allows Assuérus to make visible two such spaces at once: “You?” “What people?” He has been blindly presuming about herself, 12 and simply blind to the race to whose extinction he has pledged himself. What? you ’re one of those ? Huh? you ’re a what ? This frightening thunder can also, however, be the sound of manna falling.
• • •
There is no question that to fixate, as I have done, on the scenario sketched here more than flirts with sentimentality. This is true for quite explicable rea- sons. First, we have too much cause to know how limited a leverage any in- dividual revelation can exercise over collectively scaled and institutionally em- bodied oppressions. Acknowledgment of this disproportion does not mean that the consequences of such acts as coming out can be circumscribed with- in predetermined boundaries, as if between “personal” and “political” realms, nor does it require us to deny how disproportionately powerful and disrup- tive such acts can be. But the brute incommensurability has nonetheless to be acknowledged. In the theatrical display of an already institutionalized igno- rance no transformative potential is to be looked for.
There is another whole family of reasons why too long a lingering on mo- ments of Esther -style avowal must
It would not be hard to imagine a version of Esther set in the Supreme Court in the days immediately before the decision in Bowers v. Hardwick . Cast as the ingenue in the title role a hypothetical closeted gay clerk, as As- suérus a hypothetical Justice of the same gender who is about to make a ma- jority of five in support of the Georgia law. The Justice has grown fond of the clerk, oddly fonder than s/he is used to being of clerks, and . . . In our com- pulsive recursions to the question of the sexualities of court personnel, such a scenario was close to the minds of my friends and me in many forms. In the passionate dissenting opinions, were there not the traces of others’ comings- out already performed; could even the dissents themselves represent such per- formances, Justice coming out to Justice? With the blood-let tatters of what risky comings-out achieved and then overridden—friends’, clerks’, employ- ees’, children’s—was the imperious prose of the majority opinions lined? More painful and frequent were thoughts of all the coming out that had not happened, of the women and men who had not in some more modern idiom said, with Esther,
I dare to beg you, both for my own life and the sad days of an ill-fated people
that you have condemned to perish with me.
(1029–31)
What was lost in the absence of such scenes was not, either, the opportu- nity to evoke with eloquence a perhaps demeaning pathos like Esther’s. It was
something much more precious: evocation, articulation, of the dumb As- suérus in all his imperial ineloquent bathos of unknowing: “A périr? Vous? Quel peuple?” (“To perish? You? What people?” [1032]). “What people?” in- deed—why, as it oddly happens, the very people whose eradication he per- sonally is just on the point of effecting. But only with the utterance of these blank syllables, making the weight of Assuérus’s powerful ignorance sudden- ly audible—not least to him—in the same register as the weight of Esther’s and Mardochée’s private knowledge, can any open flow of power become pos- sible. It is here that Aman begins to tremble.
Just so with coming out: it can bring about the revelation of a powerful unknowing as unknowing, not as a vacuum or as the blank it can pretend to be but as a weighty and occupied and consequential epistemological space. Esther’s avowal allows Assuérus to make visible two such spaces at once: “You?” “What people?” He has been blindly presuming about herself, 12 and simply blind to the race to whose extinction he has pledged himself. What? you ’re one of those ? Huh? you ’re a what ? This frightening thunder can also, however, be the sound of manna falling.
• • •
There is no question that to fixate, as I have done, on the scenario sketched here more than flirts with sentimentality. This is true for quite explicable rea- sons. First, we have too much cause to know how limited a leverage any in- dividual revelation can exercise over collectively scaled and institutionally em- bodied oppressions. Acknowledgment of this disproportion does not mean that the consequences of such acts as coming out can be circumscribed with- in predetermined boundaries, as if between “personal” and “political” realms, nor does it require us to deny how disproportionately powerful and disrup- tive such acts can be. But the brute incommensurability has nonetheless to be acknowledged. In the theatrical display of an already institutionalized igno- rance no transformative potential is to be looked for.
There is another whole family of reasons why too long a lingering on mo- ments of Esther -style avowal must
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