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The Flip Side of Taboo: Incest, Affect, and Generativity in the Bahir

Sun, December 16, 4:15 to 5:45pm, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Waterfront 3 Ballroom

Abstract

This paper will explore examples of the narration of the incest taboo in the Bahir, to explain the affective work that it does in the context of the whole. Taboo is a key part of communal and religious life, but by its very nature ambivalent, conferring sanctity in pollution, and communality in separation. Freud writes that "On the one hand it means to us sacred, consecrated: but on the other hand it means, uncanny, dangerous, forbidden, and unclean. (Totem and Taboo). Douglas argues that pollution 'illuminates the structures of community" and Durkheim posits that it separates sacred and profane , and sacred things from one another according to their "degree of sacredness." These thinkers show how taboo structures society and the self. But its affective component is important as well. Here we see the same ambivalence, Affectively speaking, taboo is complicated. It is the occasion for disgust, outrage, and fear, but also for fascination, desire, and creativity. In this way it is also to the antistructure to its own structure.
In the Bahir there are taboos that affectively get the structure side of the coin, and those that get the antistructure side. While some taboos such as ritual impurity are greeted with anger and disgust, sexual taboos such as incest and mate-sharing occasion remarkably little disgust in the Bahir. Instead they become the subject of fascination, desire, and absorption. In this way, narrating sexual taboos creates a space outside of social structure, much like Turner's liminal space, on which relationality is re-imagined. This is precisely what happens in kabbalistic texts like the Bahir, In this way the violation of sexual taboos is key to both its function and its message. In these mystical texts, the breakdown of sexual taboo is the temporary breakdown of the social, and of the structures of the self. These are often understood as a barrier between human and divine so that to enter taboo is to enter a creative space, a crucible for an unbounded relational self, much like Turner's liminality. In this way I will argue that the depiction of incest is meant to temporarily dismantle the structures of society that erect barriers between human beings, the created world, and the divine. They serve to dismantle taxonomies that obstruct knowledge as it is understood in this work, and to temporarily found a creative space in which re-imagination and union are possible, and to imagine a cosmology based in this ideal.

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