Public (E-Journal, York University)

Ronell, Avital

English

A Note on the Failure of Man's Custodianship

Meyer, Moe

Unveiling the Word: Science and Narrative in Transsexual Striptease

deGuerre, Marc

Adams, Kathleen Pirrie

Introduction 
The Ethics of Enactment 
In their concentration on small scale moves, on textures, on contradictions, on imaginary 
identifications, the writings in this volume search for a sense of the ethical as it realizes 
itself through a variety of social practices. For each writer the importance of the visibility 
of these practices figures prominently. From secular iconoclasm to gynecology, in the 
museum or within the personal anecdote, the concern for the visual resonates with efforts 
to understand and to establish creative possibility and valuable action. The ethical emerg- 
ing here is clearly not a static imperative. I t  is something that requires images, icons, sto- 
ries, pictures and public display in order to be enacted. 
While this visuality could recall monolithic versions of the spectacle, throughout this 
volume such publicity is discussed in terms that emphasize instead the possibilities for 
meaning created by fascination, mobility, ambivalence, and awe. The papers also share 
a recognition of the importance of the visual for identification and its role in the produc- 
tion of history. They consider aspects of what official histories have rendered invisible, or 
conversely, isolated and desolated within the hyper-visibility that belongs to the perse- 
cuted, the exoticized, and the reviled. They trace the connections between witness and 
participant, mapping the short-circuit relation between what one sees and what one is. 
Observation and performativity are, here, hardly a beat away from one another; the spec- 
tacle as with practice never appears as something out there. 
For us the phrase "ethics of enactment" blends numerous considerations relevant to 
the affective dimensions of contemporary culture: particularly those said to be located 
"in the margins." The tension between the drift and the particular preoccupation of each 
essay is as much a constitutive dynamic as it is the effect of engaging a discourse of resis- 
tance: their movements make sense not only in relation to something they are set against. 
We assume that declaration - whether in the form of identity-statements or political 
polemics - tends to demonstrate greater concern for strategic opposition than exploratory 
initiative. Although such positivistic gestures mayfeed an ethos, a politics, or a social 
movement, they are too fixed to permit its manifestations. And so, in searching for writ- 
ings that could philosophically take into account local levels of meaning - as well as the 
necessity and even the desirability of indeterminacy, revisability and incompletion - we 
relied upon the notions of performativity and enactment. 
In the course of compiling these essays it became apparent that the writers share an 
appreciation of the importance of social rituals not only for creating collective bodies, but 
also for introducing and insisting upon ethics as an animating force of history. Our hope, 
then, is that the significance of the phrase "ethics of enactment" will develop in relation 
to the suggestion implicit in such an orientation - the suggestion that the stilled image of 
an already owned future, one belonging to invisible forces of hegemony or even catastro- 
phe, might yield to our solicitations and be put in motion. 


Introduction: The Ethics of Enactment

Seaton, Beth

The Depth Inscribed on Surfaces

Graziano, Frank

Rosa de Lima and the Tropes of Sanctity 
Frank Graziano 
- History is lived forward but read backwards. What  the actors in any particular historical 
l 1 sequence live as an "open work: characterized by unexpected turns of events and unfore- 
seeable conclusions, is later interpreted retrospectively with its initial uncertainties clari- 
fied, with narrative closure, with sediments of previous interpretations already embedded. 
Such openness of lived experience in contrast to the closure of the historical narratives rep- 
resenting it is parallelled in literary analysis by two registers of reading, one heuristic and 
the other retroactive. In the former, a reader's understanding and expectations are guided 
by the text's unfolding as, for example, a novel's plots and themes are gradually revealed. 
One remains unaware in this first reading of how one's interpretations and expectations will 
be altered, or even undermined, by developments forthcoming in the narrative. In the sub- 
sequent retroactive register, once the reader has progressed through the narrative and is 
cognizant of those new developments, he or she then recontextualizes all parts of the text 
in relation to one another and to the narrative as a whole. As Michael Riffaterre described 
it, the reader "remembers what he has just read and modifies his understanding of it in 
light of what he is now decoding,. . . reviewing, revising, comparing backwards."l Wolf- 
! gang Iser argues similarly: just as one lived event affects those which precede and follow 
1 1 it, "each intentional sentence correlative opens up a particular horizon, which is modified, 
I 
if not competely changed, by succeeding sentences."2 The revision of those sentences, or of 
I narrativized historical events, is then further compounded as a sequence is read backwards 
"through" later developments perpetually contributing their respective, retroactive gloss 
on what preceded them. 
In the seventeenth century, retroactive interpretations of this kind accumulated around 
the image of Isabel Flores y Oliva, canonized as Santa Rosa de Lima. During her lifetime 
(1576-1617) and most notably following her death, the initial or heuristic perceptions of 
- 
Rosa de Lima were transformed by a retroactive gloss, occasioning a reversal in familial, 
popular and official opinions of the girl's austerities and mortifications. While Rosa's 
excesses initially inspired her appraisal as - in words attributed to her mother - the "tor- 
turer of herself" and a "hypocrite, imposter, deceiver, {and} fake saint alien to and empty 
of any true and solid virtue,"3 such bad-faith and other insanity readings of Rosa's behav- 
iour gradually yielded to a sanctified interpretation. Rosa was expeditiously ushered 
through the process of canonization to assume, in 1671, the symbolically laden position 
as first saint of the New World and patron of the Americas. 
With Rosa de Lima's one identity (insanity) evolving into the other (sanctity), with the 
psychopathological reading of her mortifications gradually yielding to the religious one, 
there was a corresponding shift from a "factual" to a fictional (and thematized) level of 
discourse and accordingly, a symbolic displacement which recycled the repressed material 
through a proliferation of tropes. In hagiographies of Rosa de Lima a narrative tension is 
generated between the history intended and the fiction authored: the tropes are loaded in 
the hagiographies-as-fiction precisely because they are presented as facts in the hagiogra- 
phies-as-history. No fiction is as rich as the one that is unintended. Fictional facts are 
always artifacts, in this case cultural artifacts, speaking both for and through the culture 
revering them as truths. 
My present concern is to introduce one such rrope in its relation to perceptions of 
colonial Spanish America. The depiction of Rosa de Lima as a rose - no less tautological 
than the reception of her sanctity within the same socio-cultural milieu which produced 
it - is so thoroughly determined and rhetorically exploited in the seventeenth century 
that it comes to consolidate the hagiographies' predominant themes and to overflow onto 
the literature as a whole. Rose imagery is instituted early in the narratives through the 
relation of an episode in which the infant saint's face seems to have transformed miracu- 
lously into "a beautiful, great and fragrant Rose."* At the time Rosa de Lima carried the 
given name "Isabel," but moved by the miracle, her mother exclaimed, "You are the Rose 
itself.. . and from now on must have no name other than Rose."5 The change from one 
name to the other was not without its repercussions. Rosa de Lima's grandmother, after 
whom she had originally been named, was displeased in an aggressive manner, the mira- 
cle notwithstanding. When as a child the saint responded to her mother's call of "Rosa," 
she was punished by her grandmother, and when she responded to her grandmother's call 
of "Isabel," she was punished by her mother. This double bind of love and punishment 
continued until the Archbishop of Lima, Toribio de Mogrovejo (himself canonized in 1726), 
resolved the matter by confirming the girl as "Rosa." All parties contented themselves 
with the new name except, later, Rosa herself, who came to view the flowery denomina- 
tion as a sinful suggestion of beauty and vanity. The dilemma was again resolved by out- 
side arbitration; this time a statue of the Virgin Mary with the Christ child in its arms 
interceded, explaining that "it pleases the Child that she be named Rose, and that she add 
to the name the additional name of Santa Maria, forever."6 Ecstatic to please the Christ 
child (simultaneously depicted as Bridegroom), Rosa heeds the Virgin's advice and takes 
leave of this statue in the Dominican Church as Rosa de Santa Maria. 
With the cornerstone for the Rose trope thus in place, the hagiographers indulge in 
repetitions and stylizations of "our most fragrant Rose."' Many of these are simple images 
of beauty, form and fragrance; many others are baroque conceits elaborated at great length. 
The rose's symbolic representation of perfection, completion, messianic hope and other 
concepts of religiosity and purity was no doubt the intent in all cases, but rose symbol- 
ism, double-edged from the beginning, is never free of its carnal lining, carrying specific 
reference to the female genitalia and, by brief extension, to the echo of virgin fornication 
as deflowering.8 The rose's close traditional association with both worldly and other- 
worldly love was thus called into play by the symbolism of Rosa's mortifications and by 
5 1 
the tropes in the narratives representing them. Born into what Philippe Arihs described as 
the baroque era's "veritable corpus of macabre eroticism,"9 Rosa de Lima engaged in a 
voluptuous, cruel agenda of self-torture inextricably linked to her mystical preparation 
for Christ the Bridegroom, who sanctions and encourages her virginity and the mortifica- 
tions protecting it precisely because he plans to later "enjoy her as His Wife eternally."lO 
When we remind ourselves that Christ's discourse is Rosa's own - i.e., Rosa's discourse of 
the Other - and when we view the drama with the Bridegroom's presence restored to the 
imaginary realm which brought it forth, it then becomes especially evident that Rosa's 
mortifications are in service to an agenda other than the purported divine one, that a 
rationale is invented to bestow a transcendental sanction upon the desire for eroticized 
suffering which precedes it. 
The general tendency in Christianity to repress human sexuality and to divert its insis- 
tent resurgence into penance thus gains most vivid representation in a Rosa de Lima, in 
whom the denial of sexual pleasure takes an aberrant detour through self-inflicted pain as 
eroticized - auto-eroticized - as it is sanctified by the religious imagination sustaining it. 
In 1671, the same year Rosa de Lima was canonized, Juan Melkndez explained that Rosa's 
'greatest pleasure and consolation was to open up her flesh"; forbidding Rosa's mortifica- 
t i on~ ,  he concluded, would be "to deprive her of the opportunity for so much pleasure."ll 
The flesh opens, the flower opens, because the hand that wounds it claims an imaginary 
union with the hand of Christ, itself wounded. The pain is pleasurable and the pain is 
consolation for that pleasure; the sin and its penance are inextricably bound in one erotic, 
mystical gesture. 
Rosa de Lima's mortifications as acts of mystical love, as acts of union with the (imagi- 
nary) Bridegroom, are further indexed as diversions of normal sexuality when we call into 
focus the worldly factors precipitating specific episodes of asceticism and self-inflicted 
pain. When Rosa was five, to cite one cornerstone in her deification of diverted sexuality, 
she chopped off her hair (believing its beauty might lead men to sinful thoughts) and took 
a lifetime vow of virginity. Many of Rosa's self-tortures (lime rubbed on her hands and aji 
onto her eyelids, a heavy stovepot dropped on her foot, a hatpin jammed into her scalp 
when she is obliged to wear a crown of flowers) were designed to pre-empt the social out- 
ings arranged by her mother to expose the girl to appropriate suitors. On  one occasion, 
when Rosa's mother began arrangements for her daughter's ideal marriage, Rosa rejected 
the possibility by resorting to her (imaginary) status as Christ's wife, asking if she were 
expected to abandon a Heavenly Bridegroom for a man.12 Rather than courting, Rosa 
withdrew to the tiny hermitage in which "my Husband and I fit well," and the ceremony 
of erotic torture ensued.13 On another occasion the "devil" appeared at that same hermitage 
in the guise of a handsome man who "sent her lascivious signs with his eyes and mouth." 
Rosa responded by running inside her house and locking the door; she then "undressed 
and with an iron chain. . .gave herself so many and such bloody lashes that the blood 
flowed down to the floor."'* Rosa's repertory of austerities on earth in preparation for 
matrimony with Christ hereafter was gruesome, including a daily schedule of ten hours of 
work, twelve hours of mortification and prayer (the latter often recited while hanging by 
her hair from a peg in the wall), and two hours of sleep (on a bed made of "three of the 
most knotty and crooked willow trunks," the cracks between them filled with "pieces of 
rooftiles and broken plates and bowls").l5 Her diet's staple was ashes mixed with bitter 
herbs. Routine flagellation was augmented and intensified in response to particularly "sin- 
ful" occasions. No part of Rosa's body could be spared the glorified pain. When it once 
occurred to her that the bottoms of her feet remained untortured, she compensated for the 
oversight by walking barefooted across the iron of a hot stove. "Lord, increase my suffer- 
ing~," Rosa prayed at the hour of her death, making the agenda explicit, "and with them 
increase thy love in my heart." 
As Rosa's deathbed supplication illustrates, Christian mortification agendas often 
establish a proportional relation between pain and love. There are, however, more factors 
at play than Rosa's simple relation accounts for. The concept of "love" signifies simultane- 
ously in two registers: The mortifications are set in motion by denial of carnal love, of 
sexuality, but this flesh-bound love is then disembodied through mortifications penaliz- 
ing the body, symbolically mutilating the body that experiences it. Love is then transcen- 
dentalized, either by stylizing the carnal model into mystical love for an imaginary diety 
(as in Rosa's case) or more generally by desexualizing it into the Platonic love propagated 
in the New Testament. What mediates the transition from human sexuality to divine love 
in the extreme cases - and even in the paradigmatic case, if we recall Christ-the-man's 
crucifixion in relation to Adam's sin - is the interposition of violence between them. A 
diversion through pain consecrates the denial of sexuality and transforms the one love into 
the other; the ascetic, the self-mortifier, makes a "change of fire." The "sin" of the flame's 
heat is neutralized by the penance of its burn. The more psychosexual demands on the 
subject are denied and diverted, the more pathological their symbolic expression in the sub- 
ject's behaviour; Rosa's proportional relation of love and suffering is salvaged in this bal- 
ancing operation of psychic pressure and the deformation of normal sexual expression. 
In returning to the rose trope, we can see how its dual play on carnal and divine love, 
and its relation to mortification and transcendence, is further suggested by extension into 
the thematics of thorns, or into what one observer termed "the theatre of horrible thorns."l6 
Rosa de Lima herself contributes to the theme by wearing a silver crown of thorns in imi- 
tation of her Bridegroom, a crown with ninety-nine barbs rotated regularly to keep all 
parts of the scalp perpetually wounded. "All of Rosa's fragrance was for everyone, but only 
the thorns were for herself."l7 Mele'ndez demetaphorizes the thorn trope by arguing that 
many Christians wear crowns of thorns pretentiously, but that Rosa's crown was "natural": 
"What rose is there or has there ever been that is not crowned with thorns?"la He  then 
continues to assert that Rosa de Lima "was growing, and because she was a rose, the 
thorns grew with her,"l9 the one advancing in tandem with the other. In another particu- 
larly suggestive passage, the relation of the thorns' development to that of the rose consol- 
idates the crown image with an image of the closed flower's blossoming and with metaphors 
again expressing the autoeroticism of religious mortification. The erotic implications 
enmeshed in the passage ate first suggested generally by the rose's reference to the female 
genitalia, and are then enhanced by the double signification of both (flower bud and but- 
ton) and of desubrochur(se) (unbuttoning, and figuratively, opening of the flower). "The 
rose is born and the thorns are born to crown it; the thorns are rough until the rose flow- 
ers (se desubrochu) and from its green bud (both). . . breaking the narrow prison of the petals 
little by little, while the thorns get smoother and sharpen their points."20 The more the 
rose's "narrow prison" opens, the more the thorns of mortification refine themselves and 
sharpen. In addition to its representations of worldly love converted into mystical love for 
the Bridegroom, the rose trope further registers Rosa de Lima as a metonymical represen- 
tation of the Spanish colonies. To sketch the matter here briefly, the hagiographers stylize 
the indigenous "undiscovered" Americas as a barbarous insult to the Christian diety by 
virtue of their paganism, their cannabalism, their sodomy, their subjagation for centuries 
to the "tyrannical yoke of Idols."21 This sorry state of affairs is rectified because Rosa de 
Lima, as the New World's first saint, "first fruit of the Indies," "transplants" the rose gar- 
den, "the delicous Garden of the Church," from Europe to the A m e r i c a ~ . ~ ~  Jacinto de 
Parra goes so far as to pursue the transplantation trope into utopian motifs by citing a tip 
for gardeners from Pliny: "The Rose gets better when transplanted."23 Whatever Euro- 
pean Christendom left to be desired, whatever the exhausted soil of Europe failed to yield, 
will blossom now in the Edenic Indies. 
With the "pleasant garden of the New World" thus established, Rosa de Lima is 
depicted first as its perfection ("If Peru is the Garden, this flower is its finest adorn- 
ment-24) and then, pursuant to an implied decadence, as the messianic agency of its 
salvation. The hagiographies establish the necessity for such salvation on the various 
grounds of the native's continued idolatry, the atrocities committed during conquest, 
the imperfect Christianity of the Spanish colonizers, and the need to counterbalance a 
frenzy for material wealth with a spiritual commodity of equal preciousness.25 The 
hagiographies' New World desert-made-garden, now an imperfect garden, introduces 
this perfect Rose, this penitent Rose with its thorns turned inward, as part of the narra- 
tive emphasis stressing Rosa de Lima as a sacrificial victim offered in expiation to the 
same Christ who provides the model for her vicarious atonement. The induction of the 
colonies into Christendom is consummated when the Bridegroom reaches down to 
"deflower" Rosa from His newfound garden in America. 
NOTES 
A version of this essay previously appeared in Encounters 8 (December 1991). 
1. Michael Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 5-6. 
2. Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett 
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 278. 
3. Leonardo Hansen, Vida admirable de Santa Rosa de Lima, patrona del nuevo mundo, trans. Jacinto 
de Parra (Lima: Centro Catblico, 1895), 177. 
4. Juan MelCndez, Tesoros verdaderos de las Yndias (Rome: 1681), I ,  179. See also Hansen, 3. 
5. Ibid., 180. Note that Rosa de Lima's paternal surname is Flores. 
6. Ibid., 180. 
7. Juan Melendez, Festiua pompa, culto religioso, ueneracibn reuerente. . . (Lima: 167 l), 60. 
8. In early Christianity the rose was also a symbol of secrecy, discretion and silence, this dating back to 
Cupid (also responsible for the fragrance of the rose, having overturned a bowl of nectar on the flower), who 
used a rose as a bribe to dissuade Hippocrates from revealing the indiscretions of Venus. 
9. Philippe Ariks, The Hour ofour Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Vintage, 1982), 393. The 
fusion of sexuality, violence and religion gained sixteenth-century depiction in artistic as well as ascetic expres- 
sions: Diirer's Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse is mounted on a beast with disproportionately large geni- 
tals; Nicolas Manuel has Death plunge his hand into the vagina of his victim; and so on. See AriPs, 370, 373. 
10. Jacinto de Parra, Rosa Zaureada entre los santos. . . (Madrid: Impressor Eclesiistico de la Real Corona de 
Castilla, 1670), 2. 
11. Melendez, Tesoros, 230. Mallarmi's phrase "I love the horror of being virgin" is particularly resonant 
in this context. 
12. Ibid., 200. 
13. Melindez, Festiva pompa, 48-49. 
14. Melendez, Tesoros, 332 and 333. 
15. Ibid., 200. 
16. Gonzalo Andres de Meneses y Arce, Ilustracihn de La Rosa del Peru (Lima: 1670), 2. 
17. Melendez, Festiua pompa, 2 15. 
18. Melendez, Tesoros, 240. 
19. Ibid., 69. 
20. Ibid., 240. 
21. Parra, 55. 
22. Ibid., 50, and Melindez, Festruapompa, 1. 
23. Parra, 561. 
24. Hansen, 1, and Parra, 53. 
25. Rosa de Lima is accordingly often depicted in gem and precious metal tropes. 


Rosa de Lima and the Tropes of Sanctity

Jack Ben-Levi had a fellowship in  1992/1993 at the Whitney Museum Independent Study 
Program where he assisted in  the organization of i ts exhibition Abject Art  and contributed an 
essay for the catalogue. He has worked with ACT-UP for many years. 
Marc deGuerre is an artist and writer living in Toronto. 
David Freedberg is Professor of A r t  History at Columbia University. He is the author of many 
books, including The Power of Images and lconoclasrn and Painting i n  the Revolt of the 
Netherlands, 1566-1609. 
Sue Golding is a writerlphilosopher currently living in  London. She is the author of Gramsci's 
Democratic Theory (University of Toronto Press, 1992). She is president of Buddies in  Bad 
Times Theatre in  Toronto. 
Frank Graziano is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at The 
American University in Washington. He is the author of Divine Violence and the forthcoming 
Rosa de Lima: The Poetics, Politics and Psychopathology of Sanctity. 
Ronald Jones is an artist living in  New York. He exhibits regularly in  Europe and the United 
States, and is represented by Metro Pictures and the Sonnabend Gallery. 
Terri Kapsalis is a writer, performer and health educator in Chicago. She is currently teaching 
at the School of the A r t  lnstitute of Chicago and finishing her dissertation in the Department 
of Performance Studies at Northwestern University. 
Andrea Liss is Visiting Faculty in the Ar t  and Photo Programme at the California lnstitute of 
the Arts. She is a doctoral candidate in  the Department of A r t  History at the University of 
California, Los Angeles, where she is writing her dissertation entitled Trespassing Through 
Contributors 
Shadows: History, Mourning and Photography i n  Contemporary Representations of Holocaust 
Memory. She has published extensively in  periodicals such as Afterimage, Framework and New 
Observations. 
Moe Meyer is a Mellon Fellow in contemporary art criticism at California Institute of the 
Arts. He is the editor of The Politics and Poetics of Camp to be published in  November 1993 
by Routledge Press. 
Kathleen Pirrie Adams is an editor of Fuse Magazine and a writer who has published articles 
on popular music, queer polit ics and feminist f i lm practice. She is currently working on a fi lm 
project entitled Excess Is  What I Came For with Paula Gignac. 
Avital Ronell is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California 
at Berkeley. She is the author of The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech 
and Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania. 
Beth Seaton is Assistant Professor of Mass Communications at York University in  Toronto. 
The majority of her articles and book chapters are concerned with the mediation of social 
identities within popular culture. She is currently CO-editing a collection of essays on media 
and culture. 
Will Straw taught in the Film Studies Programme at Carleton from 1984 to  1993. In  September 
1993 he will begin teaching in the graduate programme in Communications at McGill University in 
Montreal. He is on the editorial boards of Screen, Cultural Studies and Perfecf Beat. With Jody 
Berland and David Tomas he is a co-editor of the forthcoming Theory Rules (YYZ Books, 1993). 
Danny Tisdale is an artist l iving in  Harlem, USA. He has exhibited extensively in  the United 
States, most recently at the I.C.A. in  Boston. 


Contributors

Kapsalis, Terri

Public "Privates" and the Gynecological Image

Liss, Andrea

Contours of Naming: The Identity Card Project and the Tower of Faces at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Freedberg, David

Iconoclasts and Their Motives

Baker, Lang

Subways and Health

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