Turning Back

ABSTRACT

This response to Miri Rozmarin’s article, “Staying Alive” (this issue), focuses on the question of what it might mean to create a response to matricide and patriarchal violence that is grounded in the particularities of cultural and personal history. Rozmarin’s rendering of a possible response to matricide through the mother-daughter genealogy is illustrated in her analysis of the biblical myth of Lot’s wife. She claims that this story of destruction, punishment, and incest reveals “an option of nonmatricidal relations” (this issue, p. 248) and she gives a compelling account of how this could be so. In my response, I suggest that there are alternative “against the grain” readings that are grounded in the Jewish traditions and sensibilities in which such “mythic” material is embedded and from which it draws its vitality. I offer an example of this not to refute Rozmarin’s claims but to suggest that something more nuanced and even loving can be found in the specificity of this cultured and gendered encounter and that this better meets the conditions for “concrete” ethical resistance that she seeks.

Notes

¹ I thank Maureen Kendler for alerting me to Rebecca Goldstein’s paper.

² Pirké of Rabbi Eliezer (Chapter 25) says, “The pity of Edith the wife of Lot was stirred for her daughters, who were married in Sodom, and she looked back behind her to see if they were coming after her or not. And she saw behind the Shekhinah, and she became a pillar of salt.” The Shekhinah is commonly thought of as the feminine aspect of God.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stephen Frosh

Stephen Frosh, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. He has a background in academic and clinical psychology and was previously Consultant Clinical Psychologist at the Tavistock Clinic, London. His most recent book is Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmissions (Palgrave, 2013).