Specters of Mark: The Second Gospel’s Ending and Derrida’s Messianicity
In: Biblical InterpretationSearch for other papers by Peter N. McLellan in
Current site
Google Scholar
This article engages Mark 16:1–8 with Jacques Derrida’s concept of the messianic as elaborated, primarily, in his 1993 volume Specters of Marx. Working with the concept of a circular Markan narrative, the tomb is explored as a haunted space in which readers are invited to return to the beginning of the story with an eye toward its spectral bodies. Indeed, the absence of a raised body in the sepulcher, coupled with an injunction to return to Galilee introduces a temporal disjunction by invoking the narrative past and exploring the incalculability of a future. While the other three canonical Gospels privilege the presence of a material body in their resurrection scenes, a Derridean analysis of this passage allows for an even more expanded notion of what a body might look like and opens the possibility for the immanence of justice to-come: justice that comes for the marginalized in the Second Gospel.
Purchase
Buy instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
Institutional Login
Log in with Open Athens, Shibboleth, or your institutional credentials
Personal login
Log in with your brill.com account
-
1
J. Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (trans. Peggy Kamuf; New York: Routledge, 2nd edn, 2006), pp. 168–69.
-
4
S. Moore and Y. Sherwood, The Invention of the Biblical Scholar: A Critical Manifesto (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2011), p. 122; Moore, Untold Tales from the Book of Revelation: Sex and Gender, Empire and Ecology (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2014), pp. 179–80.
-
7
Derrida, Specters, p. 25; see also D. Jobling, “Jerusalem and Memory: On a Long Parenthesis in Derrida’s Specters of Marx,” in Y. Sherwood (ed.), Derrida’s Bible: Reading a Page of Scripture with a Little Help from Derrida (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 100–101.
-
11
A. Gordon writes, “Any people who are not graciously permitted to amend the past, or control barely visible structuring forces of everyday life … [are] bound to develop a sophisticated consciousness of ghostly haunts and [are] bound to call for an ‘official inquiry’ into them” (Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997], p. 151). See also Buell, “Hauntology,” pp. 37–38.
-
12
Buell, “Hauntology,” pp. 123, 168. Theologian J.D. Caputo provides a helpful introduction to the term “messianic,” which he considers a “structure of experience.” This very experience is one of the “Messiah … of whom we are always saying ‘Come,’ which is what keeps things on the move.” He, she, or it therefore “is tout autre, a just one who shatters the stable horizons of expectation, transgressing the possible and conceivable, beyond the seeable and foreseeable, and who is therefore not the private property of some chosen people” (Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), pp. 162–64; see also Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1997), pp. 128–31.
-
14
J. Derrida, Archive Fever (trans. E. Prenowitz ; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 36.
-
16
Hooker, Saint Mark, p. 384; Gundry, Mark, p. 989. For ancient Hebrew literature deploying aromatics as royal honorific, see 1 Chron. 9:29; 2 Chron. 9:29–30; 32:27; Esth. 2:12; Song 1:3; 4:10; Sir. 24:15.
-
23
C. Freccero, Queer/Early/Modern (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 71; see also M. de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other (trans. B. Massumi; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 8.
-
25
A.P. Wilson, Transfigured: A Derridean Rereading of the Markan Transfiguration (New York: T & T Clark, 2007), pp. 118–19. Wilson claims that the women at the tomb are faced with their own “annihilation” in their encounter with the mysterium tremendum, similar to the situation facing the disciples at the transfiguration (9:1–10). In the promise of Jesus’ bodily presence (16:6–7), he argues, all they find is an absence (16:6), thereby calling into question the women’s own life in presence. I will take up this claim, to a degree, below. See also Wilson, “Trembling in the Dark: Derrida’s Mysterium Tremendum and the Gospel of Mark,” in Y. Sherwood (ed.), Derrida’s Bible: Reading a Page of Scripture with a Little Help from Derrida (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), p. 207.
-
29
Derrida, Specters, pp. 14–17. Consider, for example, neoconservative Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free, 1992), or Marxist Maurice Blanchot’s “La fin de la philosophie,” La Nouvelle Revue Francaise 80 (August 1959), pp. 286–98.
-
31
Derrida, Specters, p. 25, where Derrida refers to Shakespeare’s Hamlet and then continues: “If right or law stems from vengeance, as Hamlet seems to complain that it does – before Nietzsche, before Heidegger, before Benjamin – can one not yearn for a justice that one day a day belonging no longer to history, a quasi-messianic day, would finally be removed from fatality of vengeance? Better than removed: infinitely foreign, heterogeneous at its source? And is this day before us, to come, or more ancient than memory itself? If it is difficult, in truth impossible, today, to decide between these two hypotheses, it is precisely because ‘the time is out of joint’ … .”
-
32
Derrida, Specters, p. 26. For more on Derrida’s concept of the gift, see his Given Time, where he describes the gift as impossibility and outside the economic: “the gift must not even appear or signify, consciously or unconsciously, as gift for the donors, whether individuals or collective subjects. From the moment the gift would appear as gift, as such, as what it is, in its phenomenon, its sense and essence, it would be engaged in a symbolic, sacrificial, or economic structure that would annul the gift in the ritual circle of the debt. The simple intention to give, insofar as it carries the intentional meaning of the gift, suffices to make a return payment to oneself. The simple consciousness of the gift right away sends itself back the gratifying image of goodness or generosity, of the giving being, who, knowing itself to be such, recognizes itself in a circular, specular fashion in a sort of auto-recognition, self-approval, and narcissistic gratitude” (Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, [trans. P. Kamuf; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992], p. 23). See also Derrida, On the Name (trans. D. Wood et al.; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 43.
-
35
W. Brown, Politics out of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 3–4.
-
36
W. Brown, Politics out of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 6. Brown’s analysis is helpful, and I will continue to engage her work throughout this article, but it should be noted that her conceptualization of history depends on the notion that “postmodernisms” have effectively changed the progressive narrative, removing politics from the historiographical equation. She sees her role as interpreting those “postmodern” theorists as political in themselves and reasserting politics into the historical project. Thus, while she utilizes theorists like Derrida and Walter Benjamin, she curiously sets up theory as both the threat to history and politics as well as their salvation from this threat. The question of its threatening character, unfortunately, appears to reify linear temporality’s dominance and necessity as something that must be protected.
-
42
Gibbs, “Messianic,” pp. 126–27. His argument here engages a synthesis of Martin Buber’s analysis and Derrida’s fascinations with Hebrew Bible messianism. See Martin Buber, “Biblical Leadership,” in N.N. Glatzer (ed.), On the Bible (trans. Glatzer; New York: Schocken, 1982), p. 144.
-
44
Aichele, Phantom, pp. 154–55. For Aichele, Mark is emblematic of fantasy, a narrative that maintains its own inability to contain reality and thereby questions the assumed foundational character of language and “myth” (ibid., pp. 4–9).
-
54
Gundry, Mark, p. 991. The young man also exercises “authority with which he commands the women.” Gundry is apparently unaware of how problematic this statement is. See also Collins, who connects this response to Acts 10–11, where “the same device is used to comment on the significance of Jesus’ ascension” (Mark, p. 796); and Marcus, Mark 8–16, p. 1080.
-
57
Derrida, Specters, p. 32; “inheriting” is a topic important to Derridean hauntology and will be touched on more deeply below.
-
59
Wilson, “Trembling,” p. 209. Stephen Moore writes, relatedly, of the centurion’s confession of faith (15:39) at Jesus’ crucifixion, following his cry (v. 24) and death (v. 37), “Understanding occurs only at the moment when Jesus becomes absent, and when his speech decomposes as it is delivered up to death” (Moore, Mark and Luke in Poststructuralist Perspective: Jesus Begins to Write [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992], p. 25). It should be noted that both Wilson and Moore are engaged in Derridean readings outside of his hauntological work. My interest here in their work is primarily inspired by their use of “traces” and the inexpressible, both large parts of Derrida’s oeuvre.
-
62
Wilson, Transfigured, pp. 119–20. The language of “delivery” comes from Wilson’s reference to Derrida’s book The Post Card, in which he plays with the institution of the “dead-letter office.” Derrida writes that “a letter can always not arrive at its destination … . Not that the letter never arrives at its destination, but it belongs to the structure of the letter to be capable, always, of not arriving. And without this threat … the circuit of the letter would not even have begun. But with this threat, the circuit can always not finish.” This is the notion for Wilson that sets up Jesus’ apparently risen body, and the forestalled meeting, as a fragile and differed event: the body as postcard. See Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (trans. Alan Bass; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 444; for more on the Post Card in relation to Mark’s ending, see Moore, Mark, pp. 38–47.
-
73
Derrida, Specters, p. 37; here he will continue to speak again to the move toward justice in this injunction of the specter: “The pledge is given here and now, even before, perhaps, a decision confirms it. It thus responds without delay to the demand of justice. The latter by definition is impatient, uncompromising, and unconditional.”
-
76
Wilson, “Trembling,” p. 209. Moore estimates that “Mark 16:7 does seem finally to promise the long-deferred establishment of the insiders as insiders … . But 16:8, the Marcan nonending, parablelike in its demolition of narrative conventions, threatens to leave the disciples stranded yet again in a liminal zone that is neither fully inside nor yet fully outside…. Mark narrates the flight of meaning – the meaning of Jesus’ death fleeing with the women disciples, threatening to sink into silence” (Mark and Luke, pp. 24–26).
-
82
Derrida, Specters, p.123; cf. Caputo, Deconstruction, pp. 162–63; and Caputo, Prayers, pp. 128–31.
-
84
David Rhoads, Reading Mark, Engaging the Gospel (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2004), pp. 63–94.
-
85
C.I. David Joy, Mark and Its Subalterns: A Hermeneutical Paradigm for a Postcolonial Context (London: Equinox, 2008), pp. 143–65.
-
86
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 208
-
87
Donaldson, “Gospel,” p. 102. Donaldson engages Rosemarie Garland Thompson’s disabilities studies monograph, in which she posits an understanding of disabilities “not as discomforting abnormalities or intolerable ambiguities” (Thompson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature [New York: Columbia University Press, 1991], p. 38).
-
91
Myers, Binding, p. 399. Myers argues, moreover, for a narrative “balance” in Mark (p. 116); this seems suspicious to me for a story that ends uncertainly in terror.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 342 | 68 | 6 |
| Full Text Views | 250 | 8 | 1 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 84 | 16 | 5 |
Specters of Mark: The Second Gospel’s Ending and Derrida’s Messianicity
In: Biblical InterpretationSearch for other papers by Peter N. McLellan in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
This article engages Mark 16:1–8 with Jacques Derrida’s concept of the messianic as elaborated, primarily, in his 1993 volume Specters of Marx. Working with the concept of a circular Markan narrative, the tomb is explored as a haunted space in which readers are invited to return to the beginning of the story with an eye toward its spectral bodies. Indeed, the absence of a raised body in the sepulcher, coupled with an injunction to return to Galilee introduces a temporal disjunction by invoking the narrative past and exploring the incalculability of a future. While the other three canonical Gospels privilege the presence of a material body in their resurrection scenes, a Derridean analysis of this passage allows for an even more expanded notion of what a body might look like and opens the possibility for the immanence of justice to-come: justice that comes for the marginalized in the Second Gospel.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 342 | 68 | 6 |
| Full Text Views | 250 | 8 | 1 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 84 | 16 | 5 |