Desiring Conversion: Hermas, Thecla, Aseneth (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Desiring Conversion: Hermas, Thecla, Aseneth Ross S. Kraemer B. Diane Lipsett Desiring Conversion: Hermas, Thecla, Aseneth Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Diane Lipsett and I have clearly been traversing for some time the same textual territory, with intersecting interests (even more than her generous acknowledgments of my work on Aseneth would suggest). Part of my 1976 dissertation was [End Page 613] an initial foray into the thorny issues of women, gender, and erotic attachments in the Acts of Thecla and other apocryphal Acts. Unreliable Witnesses: Religion, Gender and History in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean (Oxford, 2011) sets forth my current positions on these issues, and its appearance dovetailed with Lipsett's study (something, regrettably, neither of us knew). Desiring Conversion, a revision of her 2005 dissertation, brings the perspectives and training of a literary scholar with different questions, theories, and methods to illuminate "the place of desire in the salvific transformation of three literary characters" (15): Hermas, Thecla and Aseneth. To do this, Lipsett reads Hermas alongside Michel Foucault's analysis of ancient technologies of the self, Thecla alongside feminist psychoanalytic theory drawn especially from the work of Lacan, and Aseneth alongside a treatise On the Sublime by the ancient rhetorician, Longinus. Lipsett hopes by this procedure to see otherwise obscured connections and relations in the texts, particularly those of erotics, self-restraint, gender, and conversion. Lipsett's method admirably illuminates textual elements that might easily escape the notice even of readers who have been scrutinizing these texts for many years. Particularly commendable are the concise overviews she provides of the scholarly thickets in which these texts are enmeshed. Prudently, she attends primarily to those issues that matter for her project while acknowledging yet sidestepping those that do not. Rich, subtle, eloquent, and careful as Lipsett's readings are, the question of whose readings these are looms large. Lipsett never explains how or why she chose these particular comparators. Their apparent "explanatory power" (language she regularly uses) is sufficient justification after the fact: they illuminate, therefore they are appropriate, whether or not they speak to intentions ancient authors would have had, self-consciously or otherwise. This is, perhaps, consistent with her use of psychoanalytic theories of desire to illuminate Thecla, for it implies that texts may operate in particular ways without their authors or readers' explicit awareness and acknowledgement. How these theories intersect, or more ominously, conflict, goes unexamined. Foucault rests his analysis of technologies of the self on the supposition that cultural differences are heavily historical and situational, if not arbitrary, under-girded by a universal human desire for power (for which one might read, rather, a universal male desire for power). Similarly, if perhaps somewhat differently, the appeal to Longinus is grounded in contingent cultural specificity: aspects of the representation of desire and conversion in Aseneth are due to awareness, directly or otherwise, of the conventions Longinus delineates. The appeal to Lacanian psychoanalysis, on the other hand, is an appeal to a modern, essentialist model of human desire that differs from ancient theories of desire, and that seemingly cannot be envisioned as the deliberate rhetorical strategy of an ancient author. Lipsett, of course, does not claim that it is such, any more than she claims that the author of Aseneth must have known Longinus. Hypothetically, a larger theory of human desire is not inherently in conflict with claims that a "right" theory (in this case, of desire) goes unrecognized in most cultures, which formulate and promote their own particular theories of desire, and their own conventions for its literary representation. Yet it seems deeply problematic to suggest, even indirectly, [End Page 614] that psychoanalysis, whether Freudian or Lacanian, is, in fact, the "right" theory, given that it has been generally, if not altogether, refuted and rejected by contemporary psychological research, and its use is favored now primarily by literary theorists. For many readers, Lipsett's readings will enhance a history of ideas about desire, transformation, or conversion, and gender in the ancient Mediterranean. Some historians and scholars of ancient religions may be less enamored of the tenuous moorings of these readings to actual ancient persons and to practices that are thereby somewhat obscured. One...