Joseph and the politics of memory

Review of Politics

Volumn 64, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 421-444

  Cochran, Clarke E ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34248075305     PISSN: 00346705     EISSN: 17486858     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0034670500034963     Document Type: Article

References (67)

1. "The Balkans' Heritage of Hatred," Time, 12 April 1999, p. 53.
2. See Sanford Levinson, "Silencing the Past: Public Monuments and the Tutelary State," Philosophy and Public Policy 16 (1996): 6-11 (with a response by David Wasserman, pp. 12-13).
3. All Scripture quotations are from the Revised Standard Version.
4. On these meaning of forget (sakah) in the Hebrew Bible, see International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1982), s.v. "forget."
5. Aaron Wildavsky paid close attention to the political lessons of Joseph and to the frequent misinterpretation of his life. Assimilation versus Separation: Joseph the Administrator and the Politics of Religion in Biblical Israel (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1993). My debt to Wildavsky will be apparent. However, he did not consider the role that remembering and forgetting play in the story. 6.1 am indebted to Mark Murphy for suggesting these ideas.
6. Wolin, The Presence of the Past (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), chap. 2.
7. The Presence of the Past , Ibid., pp. 1-2.
8. On the different ways that the Battle of Salamis was remembered by Aeschylus, Thucydides, and Plato, and on the political implications for Athens and political philosophy, see J. Peter Euben, "The Battle of Salamis and the Origins of Political Theory," Political Theory 14 (1986): 359-390
9. For a wide-ranging display of the subtleties of memory, see James McConkey, ed., The Anatomy of Memory: An Anthology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). The brief reflections below owe much to the students in my graduate seminar on ancient and medieval political theory during Spring 1993. Thanks to Erol Kaymak, Monte L. Monroe, Michael B. Russell, Suzanne Balch Slater, and Dan B. Wimberly.
10. See John R. Kayser, "Noble Lies and Justice: On Reading Plato." Polity 4 (1973): 489-515.
11. Plato Laws 732c. The Laws of Plato, trans. Thomas L. Pangle (New York: Basic Books, 1980).
12. See, for example, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Augustine and the Limits of Politics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), pp. 32-33,57-65. See City of Cod, 5.14.
13. The Confessions of Saint Augustine, trans. Edward B. Pusey (New York: Modern Library, 1949), bks. 10 and 9.
14. Clarke E. Cochran, "Aquinas, Prudence, and Health Care Policy," in Public Polio/ and the Public Good, ed. Ethan Fishman (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991), pp. 47-62.
15. For an account of these tendencies, particularly in Hobbes and Locke, see Wolin, Presence of the Past, chap. 2. Even the termpolitical system places modernity at odds with memory, whose "vast storehouse" (Augustine) defeats systematization.
16. Fred Dallmayr, "Liberating Remembrance: Thoughts on Ethics, Politics, and Recollection," in Alternative Visions: Paths in the Global Village (Lanham, MD: Rowman and littlefield, 1998), p. 147.
17. Dienstag, "Dancing in Chains": Narrative and Memory in Political Theory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).
18. DeLue, "The Political Theory of Forgetting" (Paper presented at the 1997 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, DC, August 28-31).
19. For a summary of the scholarship on these matters, see Joseph Blenkinsopp, The Pentateuch: An Introduction to the First Five Books of the Bible (New York: Doubleday, 1992)
20. and Richard J. Clifford, S.J., and Roland E. Murphy, O. Carm., "Genesis," in The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, ed. Raymond E. Brown, S.S., Joseph A. Fitzmyer, S.J., and Roland E. Murphy, O. Carm. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1990).
21. Alter, The World of Biblical Literature (New York: Basic, 1992), pp. 203-204.
22. A model literary reading is Gabriel Josipovici, The Book of God: A Response to the Bible (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).
23. The exemplars for political readings of the Hebrew Scriptures are: Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985)
24. and Aaron Wildavsky, The Nursing Father: Moses as a Political Leader (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1984).
25. See also Joel Rosenberg, King and Kin: Political Allegory in the Hebrew Bible (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1986). Especially important for the Joseph story is Wildavsky, Assimilation versus Separation.
26. Eugene H. Maly, "Genesis," in The Jerome Biblical Commentary, ed. by Raymond E. Brown, S.S., Joseph A. Fitzmyer, S.J., and Roland E. Murphy, O. Carm. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968).
27. Clifford and Murphy, "Genesis," p. 40. Some take this interpretation overboard. The great contemporary Genesis expert, Claus Westermarm, in a popular treatment of the Joseph stories misses their ironical and critical comments on Joseph. Westermarm even interprets Joseph's becoming an Egyptian as simply "going along," while remaining true to his faith (Joseph: Eleven Bible Studies on Genesis [Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1996]). This positive spin on the many puzzling features of Joseph's story is present also in ancient interpretations.
28. See James L. Kugel, The Bible as It Was (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 245-284
29. James L. Kugel, In Potiphar's House: The Interpretation of Biblical Texts (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1990), p. 13.
30. Contrast this with Moses' naming his first son, Gershom, because "I have been a sojourner in a foreign land" (Exod. 2: 22). Moses does not forget who he is; Joseph wants to recreate an identity.
31. Kugel, In Potiphar's House, reports that some early rabbinic interpretations of Joseph question his character, but these involve his attempted seduction by Potiphar's wife, not the elements of the story discussed here.
32. Wildavsky, Assimilation versus Separation, p. 95, and International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, s.v. "remember."
33. Kugel, In Potiphar's House, pp. 15-21;
34. Wildavsky, Assimilation versus Separation, p. 111.
35. Wilson Carey McWilliams, comments at the "Roundtable on Joseph," 1992 American Political Science Association Annual Meeting.
36. It might be objected, citing the last patriarchal theophany (Gen. 46:1-4), that this argument overstates the disastrous move from Palestine to Egypt. God after all tells Jacob that it is alright to go and that God will make him a great nation in Egypt. Note, however, that God calls him "Jacob," not "Israel," in this going. Moreover, God does not direct Jacob to go to Egypt, but appears to him only after he is on his way there. On this passage and on the will of God generally, see Wildavsky, Assimilation versus Separation, pp. 110-111,157-58.
37. On this passage, see Robert Sacks, A Commentary on the Book of Genesis (Edward Mellen Press, 1991), pp. 405-406. Jacob remembers better than Joseph that foundings are never secure.
38. Note that Jacob's own survival depended upon Esau's forgetting what Jacob did to him (Gen. 27: 45). Esau's forgetfulness seems to disqualify him as keeper of the promise, as founder.
39. See Clifford and Murphy, "Genesis," pp. 37,42. It must be noted, however, that the tribe of Joseph's son Ephraim becomes one of the most important, and its name becomes synonymous with the northern kingdom of Israel after the division of the land following Solomon's death, part of the ambiguity of Joseph's legacy.
40. Wildavsky, Assimilation versus Separation, 141.
41. See also Aaron Wildavsky, "What is Permissible So That this People May Survive? Joseph the Administrator," PS: Political Science and Politics 22 (1989): 783.
42. Josipovici, The Book of God, pp. 83ff. In his dreams, Joseph never speaks to God; nor God to him. His dreams are self-centered.
43. Wildavsky, Assimilation versus Separation, esp. chaps. 5 and 8.
44. Assimilation versus Separation , Ibid., pp. 55, 220ff.
45. See also Alter, World of Biblical Literature, pp. 114-16;
46. and Clifford and Murphy, "Genesis," p. 37.
47. Indeed, the argument of the essay is not that memory is the most important component of prudence, but that it is one vital element and that prudential memory takes a form different from mythic and other forms of remembering. Joseph's story helps to clarify these forms.
48. I am indebted in different ways to Robin Hoover and David Coolidge for this point.
49. Jan Assmann misses this important point inMoses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). Assmann considers how the "grand narrative" of Exodus forever divides Egypt and Israel. Egypt is remembered as old and false; Israel as new and true. This is certainly correct, but the Exodus narrative also carefully and continually reminds the Israelites that they can become Egyptian if they become oppressors. Moreover, Joseph's story is potent reminder of how fully even a patriarch can take on the qualities of Egypt.
50. These chapters of Genesis contain another likeness. The caravan of Ishmaelites to whom the brothers sell Joseph are carrying to Egypt "gum, balm, and resin" (37: 25). On their second journey to Egypt, the brothers carry the same cargo (43:11). Not only must Israel remember its likeness to Egypt, it must also remember its kinship to Ishmael, not an insignificant lesson for Israelis and Arabs today!
51. An excellent treatment of members and aliens in liberal theory is William James Booth, "Foreigners: Insiders, Outsiders, and the Ethics of Membership," Review of Politics 59 (1997): 259-292
52. Alter, World of Biblical Literature, chap. 5; Josipovici, Book of God, p. 177.
53. See Dienstag, "Dancing in Chains," especially chap. 7. 45.1 owe this formulation to John von Hey king.
54. An even more striking example of the kind of memory that repeats the past in order to forestall creative prospects in the present and future is the annual Orange "marching season" through Catholic neighborhoods in Northern Ireland to celebrate the Protestant victory of 1690. Here memory serves strife, conflict, and power. Enemies are clearly distinguished and viewed as unlike. Desperately needed is the will not to bring to mind, to forget certain features of the past in order to sustain hope for a different future.
55. Elshtain, Augustine and the Limits of Politics, p. 63.
56. Wolin, Presence of the Past, p. 184.
57. There is a burgeoning interdisciplinary field of "forgiveness studies," which can only be alluded to here. See Scott Heller, "Emerging Field of Forgiveness Studies Explores how We Let Go of Grudges," Chronicle of Higher Education, 17 July 1998: A18-A21.
58. Good examples of the growing literature here are: Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1996);
59. Donald W. Shriver, Jr., An Ethic for Enemies: Forgiveness in Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995);\
60. Walter Wink, When the Powers Fall: Reconciliation in the Healing of Nations (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1998);
61. and Douglas Johnston and Cynthia Sampson, eds., Religion: The Missing Dimension of Statecraft (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). Of course, within political theory, Hannah Arendt's reflections on forgiveness have been influential, The Human Condition (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor, 1959), pp. 212-223 Although he focuses on only one part of a community, rather than communal memory, Peter Digeser has important things to say about when to forget and when to forgive.
62. See "Forgiveness and Politics: Dirty Hands and Imperfect Procedures," Political Theory 26 (1998): 700-724
63. Shriver, Ethic for Enemies, especially pp. 7-9.
64. Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, pp. 131-46.
65. See also the interview with Michael Lapsley, a victim of apartheid violence and an activist in the reconciliation process in South Africa, "South Africa and the Healing of Memories," America, 18-25 June 2001, pp. 8-11.
66. Douglas, How Institutions Think (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986), p. 80.
67. Wilson Carey McWilliams argues that the Bible served such a function within American political history, "The Bible in the American Political Tradition," in Political Anthropology III: Religion and Politics, ed. Myron J. Aronoff (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1984), pp. 11-45.