'Oh, my beautiful phallus...'

Writers' deliriums about circumcision (Derrida, Lacan, Mandelbaum and Roth) against filmmakers' common sense (Allen, Burman)

Livia Manera Sambuy

(PARIS, France) - Livia Manera Sambuy, is a journalist at the Corriere della sera and the director of the film "Phillip Roth sans complexes" (Cintévé et Arte) affirms that Roth hates Woody Allen. And with good reason; when the hero of "Deconstructing Harry" – played by Woody Allen himself – addresses his son whom he did not have mutilated, he tells him: "You won't look like dad." At the contrary, Zuckerman, Phillip Roth's hero and alter ego, holds his wife the abject, delirious discourse of the sect, so that in this opportunity, Roth should really rise up against Zuckerman if he wishes to get the literature Nobel Prize:

"…….Circumcision makes it clear as can be that you are here and not there, that you are out and not in—also that you’re mine and not theirs. There is no way around it: you enter history through my history and me. Circumcision is everything that the pastoral is not, and to mind, reinforces what the world is about, which is not strifeless unity…..Circumcision confirms that there is an us, and an us that isn’t solely him and me. England’s made a Jew of me, in only eight weeks…….a Jew without Judaism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol……"(http://www.spectacle.org/1105/sy.html)

But England didn't give him his foreskin back. Whatever it is, this male chauvinist delirium makes think of Lacan's obnoxious and very anti-Freudian following statement:

"For at last, nothing less castratist than circumcision! That it should be neat when it is well done, undoubtedly, we cannot deny that the result is rather elegant. …there is all the same in the practice of circumcision something healthy on the aesthetic point of view... Well, why considering being both the sting and the sheath as the normal situation? There is, obviously, in THIS RITUAL CARE of circumcision, a reduction of bisexuality which, obviously, can only generate something healthy as for the division of parts."
Séminaire X – Anguish – 19 December 1962
http://www.ecole-lacanienne.net/stenos/seminaireX/1962.12.19.pdf

Lacan parts here from his usual clinical-theoretical delirium; this is a serious matter, it is necessary to speak clearly. But he falls into an obsessive discourse that repeats, repeats itself and repeats to us the hackneyed myths of the terrorist exploiters of youth.

Zuckerman perfectly understood the use he can draw from the very male chauvinist conception of genders that engraves a sexual intercourse of plug and receptacle type in the very flesh, within a monstrous and criminal against the child snobbery (cf. our article "Lacan, circumcision and... excision (the return... backwards!)").

At a much lesser degree, we may also think of the stance of Derrida who, in "Circonfession", wonders whether his sons will not suffer from a "without of without " out of his decision not to have them operated.

In his film critic of Le Monde on the opportunity of the publication of "The lost embrace" (Daniel Burman), Mandelbaum too affirms, denying the message of a film that fiercely criticizes the barbaric custom (cf. our article "Circumcison and peace": http://salem-news.com/articles/january142010/circ_hb.php), that "circumcision makes man enter into the dimension of without."

"- Of the without foreskin, indeed!" will answer him non-withouts (goys, a pejorative term), an answer unhappily incomprehensible to the withouts (non-goys), who cannot, and in general do not want to, know anything about what they are lacking of.

The only suitable answer would be the one that the child, if he were not screaming with pain, is not in age to express:

"Mom and dad! You made me enter into the dimension of without through giving me life, by what right do you add it up to?"

The phallic discourse is the discourse of a lead astray master who deliberately uses the mirages of a learnedly orchestrated delirium in order to seduce, intimidate and subjugate through the sole affirmation, uttered within the abuse and the power of seduction of a domineering position, in one word through the lie of the worthy.

That discourse reaches its height when it warrants the criminal acting out, here circumcision, but it might as well be "Nach Paris!" or "Allah Akbar!"

But, in the edition of Le Seuil of Lacan's Séminaire, Jacques-Alain Miller thought good to censor Lacan's terms: "this ritual care".

For once "Thank you, Mr Censor!", in the name of all those, helpless, who endure the cut of your scissors in their flesh.

Michel Hervé Navoiseau-Bertaux (Sigismond) is the author of "Sexual mutilation: excision, circumcision, the victims' point of view", for free at circabolition.multiply.com; he is an Independent psychoanalysis researcher (Chercheur indépendant en psychanalyse) based in Paris, France, who works with Salem-News.com to help raise awareness of the massive societal problems connected to the blindly accepted, mutilating practice of circumcision. He says, "Non violence is as fundamental as violence, love and hatred, justice and injustice. But power is at the tip of the tongue and the sweet violence of speech, if one takes hold of it, can silence weapons."

(La non violence est aussi fondamentale que la violence, l'amour et la haine, le juste et l'injuste. Mais le pouvoir est au bout de la langue et la douce violence de la parole, si l'on s'en empare, peut faire taire les armes.)

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