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8 Pomegranate Seeds and Scattered Ashes From n ⴐ 1 to the One ⴐ n Though the name Persephone is never pronounced in ‘‘Faith and Knowledge ,’’ her story might nonetheless be heard, or her figure seen, lurking in the background of the essay, from the various references to rape and sexual assault to, perhaps, Jensen’s story of Gradiva, where we read of ‘‘a winged messenger [who] had come up from the asphodel meadows of Hades to admonish the departed one to return.’’1 But it is really an image or an emblem that most clearly brings the specter of Persephone onto the stage of the essay. Derrida concludes the next to the last section of ‘‘Faith and Knowledge’’ with this striking image, in a fragment without a verb: ‘‘Emblem of a still life: an opened pomegranate, one Passover evening, on a tray [emblème d’une nature morte: la grenade entamée, un soir de Pâques, sur un plateau]’’ (§51).2 Emblem of a still life—of what is called in French une nature morte (literally ‘‘a dead nature’’): a cut or opened pomegranate on a tray during a religious celebration. Everything about this phrase, as well as the lines preceding it, sounds like a memory (Sam Weber calls it a ‘‘screen memory’’3 ), the memory of an actual painting, perhaps, or even more likely a childhood memory of Passover in a Sephardic Jewish family in Algeria, a memory that resurfaces from its underworld to haunt Derrida and invade his text on religion on its closing page, a memory whose central image is itself haunted by a long history of religion or religions. In the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible, the pomegranate is an important religious symbol. It adorns, for example, priestly garments and the Palace of King Solomon.4 As Sam Weber reminds us, it is also a fruit that, 227 in the wake of the exile after the ‘‘Passover,’’ came ‘‘to signify the pleasures left behind but also those they hoped one day to recover.’’5 It is thus no surprise that this fruit would become associated with religious celebrations , particularly Jewish ones, and particularly Sephardic Jewish ones, in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, a fruit commonly eaten during celebrations of Rosh Hashanah or the Jewish New Year. But since, as we saw in Chapter 6, ‘‘Jewgreek’’ is always, for Derrida, ‘‘greekjew’’ (see ‘‘VM’’ 153), we must recall that the pomegranate is also an image out of Greek mythology, one that is almost a synecdoche for the underworld and, especially, for the goddesses of the underworld. Indeed it is difficult not to associate this image of the pomegranate with the figure of Persephone —or, more to the point, it would have been difficult for the one who wrote of Persephone, of the phonē of Persephone, in ‘‘Tympan’’ and elsewhere, not to associate the pomegranate with this goddess of the underworld , who spends half the year below the earth, in the land of the dead, and half the year above it. In the context of ‘‘Faith and Knowledge’’ and of the figures of the phantasm that we have been following, it is also hard not to recall that Persephone (also named Korē, not exactly Khōra, but close), daughter of Demeter and Zeus, was abducted and sexually assaulted by Hades while picking flowers in a meadow and forced to live in the underworld with him. Inconsolable over the loss of her daughter, Demeter abandoned her role as fertility goddess, causing crop failure and famine and threatening the human race with extinction. To remedy these ills, Zeus sent Hermes to the underworld to persuade Hades to release Persephone, though Zeus tricked Persephone before her release into eating six (or in some accounts three) seeds of a pomegranate, making her unable to leave the underworld permanently and obliging her to return to Hades for six (or in some accounts three) months of the year. Hence Persephone was allowed to live part of the year with her mother Demeter above the earth and forced to live part with Hades in the underworld. Persephone thus came to symbolize the violence of men against women, and particularly the violence of rape, and young girls and women would offer sacrifice to her as the patroness and protectress of marriage and childbirth.6 The pomegranate itself thus became, in Greek mythology and religion, an image of all these polarized and conflicting values. It is perhaps not a coincidence, then, that in...

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