{"id":18087,"date":"2011-12-12T21:41:19","date_gmt":"2011-12-13T02:41:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=18087"},"modified":"2011-12-12T21:41:59","modified_gmt":"2011-12-13T02:41:59","slug":"sex-as-truth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2011\/12\/sex-as-truth\/","title":{"rendered":"Sex as Truth"},"content":{"rendered":"

Joseph Spencer, in his encouraging\u00a0response <\/a>to Taylor Petrey\u2019s Dialogue article<\/a>, \u201cToward a Post-Heterosexual Mormon theology,\u201d makes the following claim:<\/p>\n

Now, before I take up my quibble, I want to make sure I\u2019m not misunderstood. In arguing on behalf of eternal gender, I do\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0mean to suggest that there is nothing problematic with the way Latter-day Saints talk about gender. I entirely agree with Petrey that \u201cLDS theology faces serious credibility issues by continuing to hold to precritical assumptions about sexual difference.\u201d I offer no defense of natural or inherent sexual identity. My argument is rather that the theological gesture, made in the Proclamation on the family, concerning eternal gender can be utilized as a theological resource\u00a0against<\/em>\u00a0naturalism or inherentism, rather than interpreted as an attempt atsecuring<\/em>\u00a0naturalism or inherentism. And I want to claim further that the fully faithful tone Petrey strikes in the first two parts of his essay might only be sustainable in a critique of gender if eternal gender is taken as an existing idea to be rearticulated in more expansive terms and not as a theological faux pax to be abandoned.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On this point in particular, I think Spencer is on the right track: what if, as Mormons, our valorization of sexual difference as \u201ceternal\u201d is actually revolutionary rather than conservative?<\/p>\n

What follows is a rough attempt at framing a possible approach to sexual difference that treats this difference as a truth the gospel aims to produce<\/em> rather than as a fact that is already given. (Warning: the essay is thoroughly speculative and – this may be a deal breaker – some French philosophy ensues.)<\/p>\n

———-<\/p>\n

I’ve long been puzzled by the consistent association of Mormon beliefs with all things \u201cconservative\u201d or \u201ctraditional.\u201d The core of the Restoration, it seems to me, is its commitment to a set of revolutionary<\/em> beliefs about the nature of God, the meaning of life, and the potential of human relationships. We do not wish to turn back the clock or retreat to an earlier day. For Mormons, even the Fall is fortunate and progressive.<\/p>\n

Writing from Liberty jail in the spring of 1839, this must have been painfully obvious to Joseph Smith. In Section 123 of the Doctrine and Covenants, Joseph writes that the spirit of the devil has \u201criveted the creeds of the fathers, who have inherited lies, upon the hearts of the children, and filled the world with confusion, and has been growing stronger and stronger, and is now the very mainspring of all corruption\u201d (123:7). The traditions of men, he continues, are \u201can iron yoke\u201d and \u201ca strong band\u201d\u2014indeed, \u201cthey are the very handcuffs, and chains, and shackles, and fetters of hell\u201d (123:8).<\/p>\n

These considerations lead me directly to the question of marriage. If Mormonism is revolutionary and non<\/em>-traditional in any respect, it is so in its doctrine of eternal marriage. We claim not only that marriage is central to the meaning of life but, more radically, that it is also central to what it means to be God. Our position is that marriage, rather than simply being a social and economic necessity or a path to finite satisfactions, is the very door that opens onto infinity.<\/p>\n

If we have anything uniquely powerful to declare to the world, it is that, through an eternal marriage, Christ promises us the love, grace, and freedom that can only be received if the fisted grip of tradition is loosened, opened, and offered to God.<\/p>\n

For the sake, then, of exploring the possible meanings of an eternal marriage, I propose the following four theses:<\/p>\n

1. Eternal marriage is God\u2019s kind of marriage, a marriage characterized not simply by an infinite duration but by an infinite fidelity to the truth of one\u2019s word.<\/p>\n

2. The \u201ctraditional\u201d meanings and functions ascribed to marriage are insufficient because they are firmly grounded in finite interests rather than an infinite fidelity.<\/p>\n

3. Eternal marriage breaks with the traditional finitude of marriage because it is the active production of an eternal truth about sexual difference.<\/p>\n

4. Sexual difference, as the making of an infinite truth, is a spiritual difference that exceeds the finitude of biological conditions and inflects the unity of \u201ceternal life\u201d into the infinite Two of \u201ceternal lives<\/em>.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

1. Eternal marriage is God\u2019s kind of marriage, a marriage characterized not simply by an infinite duration but by an infinite fidelity to the truth of one\u2019s word.<\/em><\/p>\n

I\u2019d like to begin with a remark frequently made by Bruce R. McConkie about what Mormons mean by \u201ceternal life.\u201d With his eye on Section 19 of the Doctrine and Covenants, Elder McConkie argues that, \u201cas used in the scriptures, eternal life <\/em>is the name given to the kind of life that our Eternal Father lives. The word eternal<\/em>, as used in the name eternal life<\/em>, is a noun and not an adjective. . . . He being God, the life he lives is God\u2019s life; and his name . . . being Eternal, the kind of life he lives is eternal life.\u201d[i]<\/a> Elder McConkie\u2019s suggestion is that we understand the \u201ceternal\u201d in \u201ceternal life\u201d as an indicator of the quality of the life in question rather than as a characterization of its brute duration.<\/p>\n

Eternal life is eternal, not just because it is infinite, but because it is infinite in a particular way<\/em>. I would suggest that the primary sense of eternal is this: the word eternal fittingly describes God\u2019s kind of life because God\u2019s life is, above all, characterized by an infinite and unconditional fidelity to the truth of his word. Here, \u201ceternity,\u201d \u201cfidelity,\u201d \u201ctruth,\u201d and \u201cword\u201d form an indivisible constellation of crucial concepts where each is needed in order to properly understand the others.<\/p>\n

Now, apply this characterization of \u201ceternal\u201d life to \u201ceternal\u201d marriage.\u00a0 Just as an eternal life is God\u2019s kind of life, an eternal marriage is God\u2019s kind of marriage, a marriage characterized above all by an infinite fidelity to the work of making a truth out of one\u2019s word.<\/p>\n

2. The \u201ctraditional\u201d meanings and functions ascribed to marriage are insufficient because they are firmly grounded in finite interests rather than an infinite fidelity.<\/em><\/p>\n

Traditionally, marriage is not<\/em> eternal. Rather, the traditional meanings of marriage can be broken into two segments, both of which are rooted in finite interests: (1) marriage as a hub of economic exchange and social production, and (2) marriage as an expression of preference in the pursuit of personal satisfaction. These traditional meanings are not bad in themselves, but they are certainly not eternal in the sense described above.<\/p>\n

First, consider marriage as an economic and social machine. In her excellent and comprehensive study, Marriage, a History<\/em>, Stephanie Coontz explains that \u201cfor centuries, marriage did much of the work that markets and governments do today. It organized the production and distribution of goods and people. It set up political, economic, and military alliances. It coordinated the division of labor by gender and age. It orchestrated people\u2019s personal rights and obligations in everything from sexual relations to the inheritance of property.\u201d[ii]<\/a><\/p>\n

In this sense, marriage was traditionally not a private affair of primarily personal interest. Rather, marriage served as a social, political, and economic hub for the production of goods and the distribution of social roles. \u201cCertainly,\u201d Coontz continues, \u201cpeople fell in love during those thousands of years, sometimes even with their own spouses. But marriage was not fundamentally about love. It was too vital an economic and political institution to be entered into solely on the basis of something as irrational as love.\u201d[iii]<\/a><\/p>\n

The re-centering of marriage in the \u201cirrationality\u201d of private, personal preference is a relatively recent phenomenon. It is only in the eighteenth century, and only in very limited circumstances, that people \u201cbegan to adopt the radical new idea that love should be the most fundamental reason for marriage and that young people should be free to choose their marriage partners on the basis of love.\u201d[iv]<\/a><\/p>\n

Further, it is important to recognize that, if, today, we experience an instability in the meaning of marriage, it is a result of this shift. As long as marriage is fundamentally a public affair serving social and economic interests, then these social and economic obligations do themselves work to stabilize the meaning of marriage.<\/p>\n

However, Coontz argues, \u201cas soon as the idea that love should be the central reason for marriage, and companionship its basic goal, was first raised, observers of the day warned that the same values that increased people\u2019s satisfaction with marriage as a relationship had an inherent tendency to undermine the stability of marriage as an institution.\u201d[v]<\/a><\/p>\n

In other words, it is the proposed centrality of personal, romantic preference that has allowed the meaning of marriage to be called into question. The fact that it has become a personal choice<\/em>, rather than a social and economic necessity, is what undermines its stability. If this connection is not recognized, then we will miss the irony involved in unreflectively arguing for the return of stable, \u201ctraditional\u201d marriages: to argue for the return of this traditional stability is to argue that marriage ought not<\/em> to be centered in personal choice.<\/p>\n

The Mormon doctrine of eternal marriage does not prescribe a reactionary \u201creturn\u201d to a household based economy. Our claim is not that time must be rolled back, but that it must be pushed forward. Marriage must become something that it has never been. It must become eternal.<\/p>\n

3. Eternal marriage breaks with the traditional finitude of marriage because it is the active production of an eternal truth about sexual difference.<\/em><\/p>\n

There are two parts to this thesis: (1) the claim that an eternal marriage is eternal by virtue of its producing a certain kind of truth, and (2) the claim that the specific truth in question is the truth of sexual difference. Both are complex and it will be necessary to treat them one at a time.<\/p>\n

First, the claim that an eternal marriage produces a truth that would not exist, at least not in the same way, without it. Here, truth should not be understood as a correspondence with something already and necessarily the case. Such a truth could be \u201ceternal\u201d only in the banal sense of having a brute duration.<\/p>\n

Rather, the kind of truth in question is the kind of truth appropriate to both dramatic conceptual invention and the truthfulness of a promise. This is a truth appropriate to God\u2019s being eternal: a truth that, like a promise, must be created and that, also like a promise, is sustained only by an infinite fidelity to the words thus spoken.<\/p>\n

One way to mark the difference between a banal truth and a properly eternal truth is proposed by the contemporary French philosopher, Alain Badiou. Badiou proposes that we refer to banal truths as \u201cknowledge\u201d and reserve the word \u201ctruth\u201d for what is eternal. While both knowledge and truth are essential, the difference is this: whereas knowledge is relational and conservative (i.e., \u201ctraditional\u201d), truth is nonrelational and inventive.<\/p>\n

Think of knowledge as a grand, encyclopedic repository of everything that we understand about ourselves and the world around us. This encyclopedia of knowledge plays an important part in shaping our understanding of the world not only because it conserves information but because it also orders this mountain of information into manageable categories. Knowledge files the facts away, making sure that everything that has a place finds its place. Knowledge, however, is incomplete. And it is incomplete not only in terms of its content but\u2014and this is of much greater importance\u2014its categories are incomplete as well. In other words, there are some things for which knowledge, because it is finite, has no place prepared.<\/p>\n

This brings me to a definition of truth: truth is an invention that exceeds the given, finite categories available in the encyclopedia of knowledge. A truth, rather than being amenable to traditional categories, literally makes a difference<\/em>.<\/p>\n

For example, imagine the world as it was known by Europeans before Copernicus. The earth was taken to be the center of the universe around which the sun, the stars, and the planets turned, each embedded in rotating spheres. For a long time, this view functioned as the most amenable way of organizing all available information about the heavens. Nonetheless, anomalies in the orbits of the planets continued to defy explanation and, for the sake of the \u201cencyclopedia\u201d of knowledge, some information had to be excluded altogether from the increasingly inadequate model. The Ptolemaic system simply had no place for them. In 1543, pressed by the necessity of more adequately accounting for the aberrations, Copernicus initiates a revolutionary shift in the very structure of knowledge by proposing a crucial difference: the universe must be understood as heliocentric. However, the proposal was not, in itself, enough. In order for the difference to be sustained and extended in opposition to the inertia of tradition, the truth required a relentless fidelity.<\/p>\n

Truths, then, when first produced, initially show up as a break, a gap, a hole in the finite system of fixed relations and banal exchange. Truth interrupts the smooth circulation of meanings and monies. Where knowledge is relational and operates to conserve the sameness of established categories and connections, truth is a kind of difference or nonrelation that disrupts the status quo by forcing our attention to the gap or difference around which the system will need to be reorganized.<\/p>\n

As a result, to argue that eternal marriage ought to be understood as a truth is to argue that marriage ought to be understood as the introduction of a difference, of a nonrelation<\/em>, or as an experience of a break in the finite organization of the world.<\/p>\n

4. <\/em>Sexual difference, as the making of an infinite truth, is a spiritual difference that exceeds the finitude of biological conditions and inflects the simplicity of \u201ceternal life\u201d into the infinite Two of \u201ceternal lives.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

But what sense does it make to speak of eternal marriage as a nonrelation? Isn\u2019t marriage supposed to be a relationship that completes us, that fills in our gaps and covers our emptiness?<\/p>\n

The difficulty is this: we tend to think about romantic love as a union that completes us by giving us our \u201cbetter halves\u201d because we tend, even in the Church, to consistently reduce the unconditional truth of the eternal to the conditions and categories set by personal preference. Personal preference defines marriage as an experience of completion and satisfaction because it understands marriage as a kind of economic exchange conducted for the sake of mutually satisfying a set of shared interests.<\/p>\n

I am not arguing against interest, relations, and satisfactions per se. Knowledge and economy are the very stuff out of which the world is made. Nonetheless, I do want to argue against the reduction<\/em> of life to preference and satisfaction. In this sense, an eternal marriage marks the intervention of something excessive and unexpected, something that interrupts our satisfactions. To undergo the eternal is to undergo something of an entirely different order than preference, pleasure, and satisfaction. Marriage, if its meaning is to be refounded in the infinite, must likewise break with the conservative order of economy.<\/p>\n

That eternal marriage is structured by an irreducible difference is, I think, the very heart of what Section 132 of the Doctrine and Covenants means to convey when it cites the substance of John 17:3\u2014with, however, a single crucial difference.<\/p>\n

In the middle of an extremely important discussion of the new and everlasting covenant of marriage, verse 24 cites John 17:3 in the following way: \u201cThis is eternal lives\u2014to know the only wise and true God, and Jesus Christ, whom he hath sent.\u201d The difference is this: in John, eternal life is singular. In the context of eternal marriage, eternity splits and pluralizes eternal life into eternal lives<\/em>. My argument is that this pluralization refers, first and foremost, to the way that marriage transforms human sexuality from a merely biological difference into a truth that is both spiritual and eternal.<\/p>\n

Everything said beyond this point depends on the following proposition. Human sexuality is not reducible to biology; rather, human sexuality is irremediably grounded in the symbolic, spiritual dimension of the \u201cword.\u201d<\/p>\n

I take this position to be the essence of a Mormon understanding of human sexuality. Gender, as the Proclamation on the Family reminds us, is \u201can essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose,\u201d[vi]<\/a> and, as such, it is fundamentally a spiritual, rather than a biological, distinction. To say that human sexuality is not reducible to biology is to say that it is not reducible to hormones, genitalia, instincts, pleasures, or emotions\u2014though, again, this is not to deny their constitutive importance. The human experience of sexual difference is human<\/em> (rather than animal) only to the extent that it is interwoven with our symbolic, spiritual grasp of the world through the word.<\/p>\n

If sexual difference is a difference ultimately rooted in the \u201cword\u201d rather than in biology (and, as a result, is a difference that does not necessarily map neatly onto obvious biological differences like differences in genitalia), then what is <\/em>this difference? It is not sufficient, in order to consider sexual difference as a potentially eternal truth (at least in the sense sketched above), to treat the difference as a difference locatable within <\/em>the confines of the order of knowledge and tradition. Rather, sexuation, in order to be thought as a truth, must be more radically rooted in two discrete relations to this symbolic order.<\/p>\n

Here, the thesis is that, in relation to the symbolic order, there is both a masculine position and a feminine position and that these positions are incommensurable. The claim is this: the feminine mode of grasping the symbolic, the feminine way of knowing the world, is fundamentally different from the masculine position, and vice versa. It is this difference that constitutes sexual difference as more than biologically meaningful.<\/p>\n

In the course of our everyday lives, the difference between these sexuated positions tends to disappear in the swirl of interests, preferences, and satisfactions. This is not to say that we do not distinguish between men and women during the course of an ordinary day, but that men generally relate to women simply on the basis of interests grounded in their own masculinity, not in an experience of the incommensurable difference between the masculine position and the feminine position. Women are not excluded from the masculine encyclopedia of knowledge, nor are men excluded from the feminine system of symbolic classification. However, in the normal course of everyday life, men simply appear to women in the orbits assigned to them by a feminine cosmology and women simply appear to men in the orbits assigned to them by a masculine model of the universe. However, like the unexplained aberrations in the orbits of the Ptolemaic planets, these respective positions necessarily exclude from their field the other sex\u2019s unaccountable symbolic position. In other words, men, for instance, certainly appear within a feminine logic, but the idiom of their own masculine logic is not likewise translatable.<\/p>\n

I have pressed what is an extremely complex thesis about the nature of human sexuality into such a cramped space for the sake of making an argument about the meaning of eternal marriage.<\/p>\n

Eternal marriage, rather than being the mutual satisfaction of sexuated interests and preferences, is an interruption or a calling into question of these preferences<\/em> by the incommensurable logic of the other sexual position.<\/p>\n

Love is an experience of the nonrelation<\/em> of sexual difference. It is an exposure to the gap in being human that is human sexuality.<\/p>\n

In an eternal marriage, the hegemony of our respective symbolic positions is broken by an excess for which we did not and cannot account. The eternal does not valorize the integrity of the individual nor celebrate the synthesis of two individuals into a greater whole.<\/p>\n

Instead, eternal marriage is a declaration of persistent fidelity to the discovery that there are two<\/em>\u2014that there is not just life (singular) but lives (plural). This revelation, the insertion of this sexual difference, the splitting of my One into a shared fidelity to the Two, is the key to the highest kingdom in the celestial order.<\/p>\n

The maintenance of this fragile Two in its difference is arduous. The constant temptation is for one of the two positions to subsume the difference of the other under its own preferences and thus heal the breach. This is precisely what happens, for example, in any kind of chauvinism, male or female. However, the moment when this rapprochement is accomplished, the eternal has been once again reduced to an economy of interests and satisfactions.<\/p>\n

As a result of this particular danger, eternal marriage, as the production of a truth about human sexuality\u2014the truth that there is a sexual difference<\/em>\u2014must proceed in a slightly different way than was indicated by the Copernican model. In the previous example, Copernicus produced a truth about the nature of the universe as heliocentric when he forced the inclusion of the differences excluded by the Ptolemaic system. In this sense, Copernicus effected a new synthesis by reordering the logic of astronomy. However, such a \u201csynthesis\u201d of sexual difference is, here, precisely what must be avoided in order to remain faithful to the discovery of the Two that is love. Indeed, as incommensurable, a synthesis of the masculine and feminine positions is impossible without disastrously reducing the difference of one to the homogeneous logic of the other.<\/p>\n

Fidelity to the difference that is human sexuality does not manifest itself in trying to overcome sexuation by \u201cgetting to know\u201d the other position, but in dedicating itself to a joint re-investigation of the world in light of the fact that there is such a difference. In this way, eternal marriage is revolutionary because it breaks the world itself in two: there is the world before the intervention of sexual difference and there is the world after it.<\/p>\n

What we make of our lives in both making love and in making a truth out of love depends on how faithful we remain to the eternal work of uncovering and carrying through all of the consequences of this incommensurable sexual difference.<\/p>\n


<\/p>\n
\n
\n

[i]<\/a> Bruce R. McConkie, Mormon Doctrine <\/em>(Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1995), 237.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[ii]<\/a> Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage<\/em> (New York: Viking, 2005), 9.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[iii]<\/a> Coontz, Marriage,<\/em> 7.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[iv]<\/a> Coontz, Marriage, <\/em>5.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[v]<\/a> Coontz, Marriage, <\/em>5.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[vi]<\/a> \u201cThe Family: A Proclamation to the World,\u201d Ensign,<\/em> November 1995, 102.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joseph Spencer, in his encouraging\u00a0response to Taylor Petrey\u2019s Dialogue article, \u201cToward a Post-Heterosexual Mormon theology,\u201d makes the following claim:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":135,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18087","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corn"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18087","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/135"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18087"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18087\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18095,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18087\/revisions\/18095"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}