seeing the instability of racial categories or national identities as a sort of category failure—the desire to construct “whiteness” cannot outpace the messy realities of daily existence; the will-to-“Americanness” is constantly troubled by new and unexpected contingencies and border infiltrations—we instead read such instabilities as part of the very nature of categories: “whiteness” abhors but longs for its internalized racial otherness, “Americanness” shouts for borders that can never be securely established.20 The politics of race and nationhood become much more pliable and open to critique when we begin to see that the very attempt to bound and define constitutes a hidden act of dissolution and blurring.
Other scholars precede me (and instruct me) in the appropriation of psychoanalytic theories of identity deployed in the social field of history. Anne McClintock’s 1995 study Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest employs psychoanalytic frameworks to untangle the politics of race, gender, and class from Victorian England to postindependence South Africa. McClintock follows in the footsteps of postcolonial theorists from Frantz Fanon to Homi Bhabha,21 and feminist theorists such as Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigarary, all of whom have operated at the intersections of politically informed history and psychoanalytically informed theory: “Psychoanalysis and material history are mutually necessary for strategic engagement with unstable power,” McClintock writes.22 Practicing what she terms a “situated psychoanalysis,”23 McClintock weaves together various strands of thought that have moved psychoanalysis from the realm of the therapeutic and individual to the study of the historical and social, demonstrating the analytic value in rethinking difference and identity. Moving away from a binary logic that automatically diminishes and partitions the “other” of identity, this new view of subject (and community) formation leaves the “self” and “other” of identity mutable and dynamic, embedded in the shifting realities of a material world open to ambivalence and anxiety.
History, Theory, and Hybridity
It will become evident in the course of this book how I think this new model of difference based on the fantasy of boundaries can help us interrogate identity and difference in early Christianity. I want to make it clear in this introduction, however, that this is not simply a case of theory swapping, that, weary of sociology and anthropology, I turn to the linguistically puzzling and intellectually challenging world of “situated psychoanalysis.” Just as the psychoanalytic construction of identity can be theoretically useful in exploring issues of race, gender, and nation-state formation, it is specifically applicable, I argue, in the context of the late ancient Roman Empire. In the early Christian context, we have a social and cultural situation in which recent postcolonial interpretations of “empire” dovetail with the psychoanalytic framing of identity and provide new insight into the workings of the Roman Empire.
A contrast between the imperial logics of the Greeks and Romans is instructive to get our historical and theoretical bearings. We tend to think of “Greekness” (hellenismos) as it developed in the post-Persian period as hinging on a putative binary distinction between self and other, creating a coherent cultural and social self (“Hellene”) through the articulation of an excluded other (“barbarian”). It is no surprise that the socioanthropological model of boundary formation and exclusion has proved particularly useful in illuminating this cultural ideal.24 Roman imperial identity, however, coming fast on the heels of this “Greekification” of the East, understood itself to be operating very differently.25 Throughout the imperial period (emerging already in the late republic) we can pinpoint no overarching ethnic or cultural totality of “Romanness” that defined participation in the empire, analogous to Alexander’s hellenismos. Or rather, “Romanness” was not expressed through boundary and exclusion. Romanitas was not the imperialization of Latinitas,26 and the political unity of Rome never mapped onto any consistent cultural homogeneity. To be sure, we see traces of a “Roman/barbarian” dichotomy in Latin literature,27 as well as attempts to construct a coherent sense of self in contradistinction to “others.” But whereas Greeks identified barbarians in order to draw distinction and boundaries, Romans identified the barbarians as a site for the exercise of Rome’s civilizing power.28 The other was not to be excluded; he was to be incorporated, otherness intact, into the Roman sphere of imperium. Jeremy Schott succinctly notes, “Rome sought to contain the threat of diversity by incorporating otherness within its borders, not through its elimination.”29
As the Roman Empire grew, it imagined its origins not in the clearly bounded selfhood of ethnic autochthony—the mythical articulations, for instance, of ancient Greek identity30—but rather in domination and appropriation of difference.31 From the rape of the Sabine women through the opening up of the Roman Senate to Gallic nobles, Rome’s founding power was to seize, appropriate, and manage difference. Tacitus’s version of Emperor Claudius’s speech to the Senate, in which the emperor argues for the extension of senatorial status outside of Italy, captures how Rome’s logic of empire differed from that of the Greeks: “What else was the downfall of the Spartans and Athenians except that—although they prevailed in arms—they bounded off (arcebant) those whom they conquered because they were foreign-born (alienigenis)? But our Founder Romulus was so wise that multiple peoples (plerosque populos) on the same day he held as enemies and then as citizens (civis)” (Tacitus, Annales 11.24).32 Greek xenophobia and boundedness make way for Roman heterogeneity, a strategy, we are led to believe, that is ultimately more successful in the expansion and management of an empire.33 Yet with that internalization of difference comes an anxiety about subjectivity: Juvenal, through his disaffected poetic character Umbricius, complains about the unctuous Syrian Orontes flowing into the Tiber, leaving its Greek dregs on once-pristine Roman banks (Juvenal, Satura 3),34 even as his contemporary Martial marvels at the exotic cacophony (human and animal) in the imperial arena.35 “The city of imperial splendour was full of reminders of the violence of conquest,” Catharine Edwards and Greg Woolf have remarked.36 As the city grew into an empire, Rome’s power continued to be defined through an anxious ability to contain and absorb difference.
Conditioned as we are by Gibbon’s eighteenth-century tristesse,37 we imagine the boundaries of the empire from the third century onward slowly crumbling, barbarians first dribbling and then pouring over poorly guarded and ineffective borders.38 Yet C. R. Whittaker’s recent work on the Roman Empire’s borders has asked us rethink the limites of Empire.39 These were not, after all, boundaries but rather frontiers: sites for the negotiation and management of difference.40 The physical limits of the Roman Empire, the maintenance of this frontier zone of difference, embodied the Roman ideology of power: not the (always failed and failing) imposition of homogeneity (Hellenism, for instance) but the majestic management of difference and otherness. The very ideal of Roman selfhood, constructed out of the power of imperium, depended therefore on the persistence of difference and otherness alongside and within the limits of empire. Difference can never be eliminated or covered over, but must remain visible in order to support the logic of Roman domination.
Identity in this Roman Empire is thus always split against itself, a self that must always confront, appropriate, and risk being destabilized by difference. Like the child of Lacan gazing into the mirror, the Roman comes to desire the other that defines his self, and yet fears its difference. One way to frame this cultural economy of the Roman Empire—always identifying, categorizing, and internalizing the difference of its subject peoples—is through the theoretical concept of hybridity, as elucidated by postcolonial theorists.41 The critical force of the “hybrid” elaborates the psychoanalytic description of the self outlined above, in that it helps us to uncover the fiction of a closed, bounded identity. Language of purity and containment, focused on the fear of the (racial, ethnic, or religious) mixing of the hybrid, masks the very operations of appropriation of those feared “others,” and covers over a reality that is always already mixed: “colonial specularity, doubly inscribed,” writes Homi Bhabha, “does not produce a mirror where the self apprehends self; it is always the split screen of the self and
