suffering excites simultaneous pity and delight, would play an important role in the sexualization of erotic suffering.106
Edwards perfected his strategy of invoking and then intervening in the connection between abjection, evangelical speech, and the development of a Lockean liberal self in his Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746). As several scholars note, Religious Affections reworks Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding by offering a measured evaluation of the intimate, embodied relationship between individual affect, thought, and social order.107 Religious Affections explores how the affectionate speech of a body of believers can productively disorder civil and religious society. Disruptions in both individuals and communities may, if properly discerned and managed, forward the work of grace. Key to this evaluation is Edwards’s extended metaphorical comparison of the disruptions of individual bodily function caused by religious affect to the disruptions of New England’s civil and ecclesiastical body caused by revivalists’ disorderly speech. Just as each convert should use his or her affecting sense of individual abjection as a means to evaluate his or her spiritual state, so must the church body in New England use the tumult caused by the revivals to evaluate their divine destiny as a social and spiritual community.
In Religious Affections, Edwards proposes that contemporary ministers risk repeating the seventeenth-century New England Puritan failure to form a wholly divine community if they do not distinguish spiritual corruption from divine influence.108 He evaluates the revivals’ effect on New England as a discrete community of believers, explicitly revisiting and partially sentimentalizing the seventeenth-century New England Puritan association of feminine weakness, wifely subjection, and maternal suffering with submission to patriarchal government. Compressing the most vivid and literal descriptions of physical suffering from Lamentations 1 into a single sentence, Edwards asks his readers to imagine the daughter of Zion as she “lies on the ground, in such piteous circumstances … with her garments rent, her face disfigured, her nakedness exposed, her limbs broken, and weltering the blood of her own wounds, and in no wise able to arise.” Edwards sentimentalizes the image of the suffering woman by condensing Lamentations’ diffused and insistently metaphorical images of suffering into an intensely physical suffering felt by a single figure. Edwards complicates the sentimental trajectory of the trope by taking special care to associate the daughter of Zion’s wounds with the blood of the “menstruous woman.” Zion has “none to comfort her,” Edwards writes, because she is tropologically related to the “menstruous woman” whose corrupting influence caused her to be shunned.109 Rather than entirely discarding the ritual suffering and sacrifice of Levitical law in his sentimental image of the daughter of Zion, Edwards attempts to contain her communicative potential by making her both pitiful and unclean, exemplifying the dangers of improperly managed evangelical speech.
This introduction of sympathetic suffering into the trope of Zion’s daughter locates Edwards in a long Christian discourse of abjection that Julia Kristeva aligns with the origin of psychological interiority. Reading Edwards’s use of figures of abjection against Kristeva is especially helpful as a means of evaluating the ways in which revival affect might complicate psychoanalytic categories as transhistorical truths.110 Edwards’s use of a sentimentalized figure of abjection to delimit the boundaries of evangelical speech resembles what Kristeva, following Freud, calls the incorporation of Christian speech into a masochistic economy. Kristeva writes that early Christian writings introject the abject into the clean or pure Levitical self to create “a wholly different speaking subject,” internally divided between the clean and the unclean.111 Recalling that the root of “cadaver” is “cadere, to fall,” Kristeva notes that this abject subject lives on a tenuous “border,” mired in the substances that mark Edwards’s daughter of Zion: a “wound with blood and pus … body fluids … defilement.”112 Speech, for this abject subject, becomes a means by which abjection can be ejected but maintained. The abject subject’s perpetual irruption into speech is accompanied by a sense of pleasure at encountering or accessing the infinite through speech, because at the moment of speaking sin, the sinful self realizes and, to some degree, resolves its own sin.113 At the same time, the passage also illustrates the anachronism of locating Edwards within a masochistic economy, as Edwards collapses the antithetical relationship Kristeva establishes between the masochist’s use of jouissance for the benefit of symbolic or institutional power and the martyr’s use of displaced jouissance to create a discourse that “resorb[s]” the subject into a religious community or divine Other.
The impossibility of locating Edwards’s use of figures of abjection within either Oedipal or Kristevan categories, despite Edwards’s sustained engagement with the philosophical and tropological concepts that would become central to the literary and psychological development of masochism, helps shed new light on accounts of the political or structural valence of masochistic practice.114 Freud’s masochist, for example, is never wholly or even mostly geared for the benefit of symbolic or institutional power but rather uses the structures of power to produce an inappropriate pleasure. He subverts institutional morality by demanding the infraction of a moral code as the prerequisite for the pleasure of punishment. Kristeva, accepting Freud’s description of a masochistic economy but denying its capacity to subvert institutional morality, supposes that the masochist’s apparent subversion actually works to maintain the structures of power that allow for masochistic pleasure. As a result, her proposition that the martyr’s discourse of jouissance could in some way participate in a masochistic economy without, in some way, supporting institutional power sets an incredibly high bar.
In contrast to Kristeva’s separation of the martyr’s subversion from the masochist’s support of those structures, Judith Butler and Leo Bersani propose that masochistic attachments to symbolic or institutional power can simultaneously reinforce and undermine that power.115 Butler argues that the “regulatory regime[s]” that produce desire are themselves “produced by the cultivation of a certain attachment to the rule of subjection” and can therefore be resisted intrapsychically and through performance.116 For Bersani, masochism’s spectacular dramatization of the erotics of suffering encourages “an antifascist rethinking of power structures” that may ironically result in its own “self-immolating” destruction.117 Bersani’s notion of sexuality itself as fundamentally masochistic and marked by self-shattering (ébranlement) offers a productive movement away from masochism as a drive toward a broader notion of a masochistic antirelational refusal of sociality. This refusal cannot be valorized politically but does serve to break up psychic formations or specific ideological superstructures. Bersani follows Laplanche’s return to the notion of primary masochism in his account of the infant’s receipt of painfully inscrutable messages, or “enigmatic signifiers,” from a sexual other (e.g., a parent) and translation of those messages into an interpersonal, social context. If we accept this broader notion of masochism’s ability to make the psychic pleasures of pain explicit and public, we can hear an echo of Edwards’s negotiation of revivalist sympathetic public discourse.118
Although the discontinuities between Edwards’s models of mind and heart and modern psychoanalytic models of subjectivity and subject formation are too great to allow for analogy, it may be worth considering how Bersani and Laplanche’s notion of masochism recapitulates the drama of conversion. The speech of Edwards’s ideal convert, issuing from a place of suspended certitude about salvation, resembles Bersani’s masochist’s public self-shattering, inasmuch as they both figure moments of intense emotional self-abasement and self-erasure as necessarily forgotten or moved away from and yet also necessarily remembered and repeated. Edwards’s uncontrollable weeping describes a moment of ideal self-dissolution. Conversion entails internal, affective, psychic struggle but is primarily a relational experience between the self and the divine. The convert’s most important “existence,” in other words, lies in the relationship between the soul and a transcendent God, the ultimate “Other” for whom all works are meaningless for salvation. Nevertheless, it is in their evangelism, properly managed by editorial discretion and bodily self-control, that converts become significant by entering into a millennial Christian narrative.
Inasmuch
