Death and Dissymmetry

The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges

By: Mieke Bal

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Paperback | 15 June 1988 | Edition Number 1

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319 Pages

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Combining literary criticism and feminist analysis, Death and Dissymmetry radically reinterprets not only the Book of Judges but also the tradition of its reception and understanding in the West. In Mieke Bal's account, Judges documents the Israelite culture learning to articulate itself in a decisive period of transition.

Counter to standard readings of Judges, Bal's interpretation demonstrates that the book has a political and ideological coherence in which the treatment of women plays a pivotal role. Bal concentrates here not on the assassinations and battles that rage through Judges but on the violence in the domestic lives of individual characters, particularly sexual violence directed at women. Her skillful reading reveals that murder, in this text, relates to gender and reflects a social structure that is inherently contradictory. By foregrounding the stories of women and subjecting them to subtle narrative analysis, she is able to expose a set of preoccupations that are essential to the sense of these stories but are not articulated in them. Bal thereby develops a "countercoherence" in conflict with the apparent emphases of Judgesâ"the politics, wars, and historiography that have been the constant focus of commentators on the book.

Death and Dissymmetry makes an important contribution to the development of a feminist method of interpreting ancient texts, with consequences for religious studies, ancient history, literary theory, and gender studies.

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Acknowledgments
Introduction
The Coherence of Politics and the Politics of Coherence
Two Views of the Book of Judges
How History Constructs Itself
The Construction of a Different History
The Coherence of Dissymmetry
Heroes of Might and Women of Death
Lethal Ladies
Gender, Sex, and Dissymmetry
Other Female Characters
The Language of Power
Virginity and Entanglement
Bath-Jephthah: The Daughter's Gift
Negation and Denial of Womanhood
Freud Entangled Love at First Sight
Bath's Survival
Virginity Scattered
Paradoxes of Virginity
Nonvirginal Virgins, Virginal
Spouses Between Virgin and Wife: Caught Between Men
Violence and the Sacred: Contribution to the Ethnography of Fatherhood
The Raw and the Cooked In the Name of the Law: Proper Sacrifice
Manoah's Failed Fatherhood In the Name of the Vow: Improper Sacrifice
Bath-Jephthah versus Ben-Abraham: A Case for Separation
Dreaming Fire: Violence without the Sacred
The Body Became Voice, or the Reinforcement of Culture
The Scandal of the Speaking Body: From Speech-act to Body Language
Speech-acts: The Word Become Flesh
Samson's Riddle: The Word Became Woman
The Riddle as Vow and the Vow as Riddle
The Daughter's Body Language as a Challenge to Fatherhood
The Mouth of the S/Word
The Architecture of Unhomeliness
Oppositions Limits
Dialectic Unhomeliness Revisited
The Empty House Is Haunted
The Displacement of the Mother
Explicit Mothers: Jephthah's and Abimelech's, Samson's and Micah's
Explicit Mothers: Sisera's and Israel's
Displaced Mothers: Yael
Displaced Mothers: The Woman-with-the-Millstone
Displaced Mothers: Delilah Mothering, Murdering, Making
Love: Yael Clytemnestra's Absence
Conclusion
The I, the Eye, and Objectification
The Incoherence of Coherence Once Upon a Time
Once More: Body Language
A Model for Narratological Analysis
Notes on Language
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Death and Dissymmetry

The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges

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Paperback

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