Viewing circumcision in this way helps us understand how the rite can hold such contradictory meanings for different groups of people; how, for example, it renders Jews into castrated women in anti-Semitic fantasy while at the same time appearing as a sign of ‘manliness’ for many of its proponents.7 Like the cut of sexual difference, circumcision symbolizes the moment at which both masculinity and femininity emerge as distinct,
asymmetrical ‘solutions’ to the structural antagonism of subjectivity. Eric Silverman, in his psychoanalytically informed study of the symbolism of Jewish circumcision, reaches a similar conclusion. Inspired by Bettelheim, he interprets the Jewish rite as in part an envious appropriation of female parturitive powers; while its manifest purpose is to enhance and consolidate phallic masculinity, it carries with it the shadow of its opposite, the feminization of the male. He emphasizes how circumcision is mobilized, in both biblical texts and rabbinical literature, as a means of forging a patriarchal community bounded by law which nevertheless constantly threatens to undo itself; the ‘cut’ paradoxically promises a sense of wholeness which, ‘like culture in Lacan’s theory, inevitably fails.’8 Hence, he concludes, ‘circumcision dramatizes unease over separation-individuation through a symbolism that affirms yet blurs the normative boundaries between masculinity and motherhood.’9 Circumcision separates men from women and boys from mothers; yet, through its emphasis on father to son initiation, it induces its practitioners into the very maternal and feminine identifications that, he argues, it simultaneously repudiates. This ambivalence, Silverman claims, is the very source of its power; covenants ‘often derive their sacred character from otherwise immoral or taboo expressions of violence or intimacy.’10 While Silverman limits his study primarily to the Jewish, religious context, this book will examine how circumcision’s ambivalence makes itself manifest in spaces beyond the religious, including medicine and politics.