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 as Edwards’s use of the evangelical discourse of abjection prefigures what Bersani and Butler identify as the “self-immolating” or resistant quality of attachment to subjection, its potential to disrupt existing hierarchies of speech is necessarily entangled with its attempt to maintain those hierarchies, as its promotion of abjection worked in and through its management of lay preaching and publication. Whether in his Faithful Narrative, his own conversion narrative, or his later treatises on conversion and revivalism, the difficulty with evaluating Edwards’s use of a discourse of abjection as entirely in favor of or opposed to the maintenance of institutional power derives from Edwards’s navigation of a revival discourse in which the form of subjectivity invoked through that discourse was itself unstable and contested, helping establish a white male revolutionary liberal subject as well as African and Native subjects and communities. The radical promise of affective revival was tied up with its incorporation into public ministerial practice. Edwards’s attempt to contain the communicative potential of an affective performance of abjection participated in the revivals’ eventual contribution to the rearticulation of power along new liberal republican lines but also provided Native and African Americans theological principles and public models for stabilizing and managing affective religious communities in the face of increased skepticism and hostility.119
Subsequent chapters follow two generations of Christian social reformers as they moved away from church-based social reform and toward nonsectarian radical evangelical organizing in the public sphere.120 Many of these reformers read Edwards’s work; even those who did not would have been influenced by his epistemology of conversion. In particular, the cultural reverberations of eighteenth-century notions of conversion, suffering, and publicity resound in nineteenth-century developments of race, including racializations of religious abjection, speech, and publication.
CHAPTER 2
Indian Abjection in the Public Sphere
In January 1836, William Apess, a Pequot, adopted Mashpee, and former Methodist preacher, twice delivered his “Eulogy on King Philip” at the Odeon, a luxurious Boston lecture hall that was a short distance from the Brattle Street Congregational Church where Jonathan Edwards gave his first recorded revival. The “Eulogy” as part of its celebration of Indian martial and moral virtue and denunciation of English creole violence, took issue with an emerging racial conception of Indian drunkenness or what Edwards and his disciple, David Brainerd, had called Indians’ “drunken and Pagan howlings.” Apess’s long missionary career helped him recognize a new wrinkle in the Euro-American view of Indian drunkenness. Drunkenness had long denoted Indian abjection in the absence