Unbinding the Flesh in the Time That Remains: Crusader Martyrdom Then and Now

"I Am Martyr (Fill in the Name)"

On the road to the Beirut airport, posters of Shia martyrs from Hezbollah or Amal militias are set in frames on forty-two telephone poles. Some of the frames are empty, awaiting a poster of a new martyr. As one drives by, the empty frames create an optical illusion, since the retina fills the field of vision with afterimages of the existing posters. The artists, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, write:

The electric post is between the image of the past (the martyr) and the frame to come (the next and future martyr). The post anchors these two temporalities in a kind of reality, of continuous present. Whereas juxtaposing these temporalities creates a time lag which cannot be easily represented . . . just like the ceremonial adopted for the video pre-taped farewell of the fighters before their suicide operations.¹

The specter of these afterimages is just one more reminder (as if anyone could forget) that martyrdom is an embodied act that passionately disembodies; it is haunted and haunting; it can inhabit different temporalities.² What the "now" of martyrdom might be is not a simple question with an easy answer. As an act it can take place in "official" theological and political time; it can also perform itself otherwise by inventing other temporal forms distinct from normative power. Historically, Christianity has constituted and claimed official theological time by virtue of its temporal model of supersession. First mapped by Paul of Tarsus, the writer of several magisterial epistles of the Christian New Testament, supersession is a corporeal fantasy that imagines a temporal binary—the first term of which is the carnal flesh of the Jew under the Mosaic law of circumcision; the second term is the spiritualized body of the baptized Christian that supersedes the Jew.³ With the emergence of Islam, Christian supersessionary thinking stubbornly maintained this temporal binary by confusing and conflating Muslim and Jewish flesh.⁴ Acts of martyrdom grounded in supersessionary belief strive to extend the repetitive, violent practices of what theorists call the theologico-political, that process whereby religion comes to be the difference between religions of the book.⁵ In posing the question "Who is the enemy?" the theologico-political intertwines itself inextricably with sovereignty. It is therefore ethically urgent to understand the theologico-political vicissitudes of pleasure and pain, flesh and body at stake in the cult of martyrs, then and now.⁶ This essay turns to the cries and whispers of martyrs past for what they might reveal about queer moments in which carnal flesh unbinds from the Christian supersession of the spiritual body, thus transfiguring the temporal relations of pleasure to pain. The unbinding of the flesh can release the theologico-political in the time that remains.⁷

The interlocutors for this study are the martyred ghosts of crusades past inadvertently conjured up by George W. Bush, when, on September 14, 2001, he called for a "crusade . . . against a new kind of evil." Little did he realize that crusade and martyrdom were closely bound historically, indeed, constitutive of each other.⁸ In what follows, I first listen to the stories of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim martyrs from the medieval Crusades for what they might say about the binding and unbinding of the flesh from the supersession of the spiritual body. I then explore how Torquato Tasso sought to bury these troubling specters of the First Crusade in the vault of his widely read epic Gerusalemme liberata (1581), which he published in the triumphant wake of the Christian victory over Muslims at the Battle of Lepanto (1571). So successfully did his epic encrypt those crusader ghosts that when Sigmund Freud used Tasso's story of Tancred and Clorinda for his paradigm of Western trauma in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), he did not see, hear, or feel them. The paradigm of Western trauma Freud proposed is, I shall show, the trauma of the theologico-political West as it binds the flesh from the spritualized body.⁹ In my conclusion, I consider how in these martyrial times, both...