The Typological Imaginary: Circumcision, Technology, History by Kathleen Biddick (review)

REVIEWS 186 Orlando Furioso and Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato. Alberto Casadei, “The History of the Furioso,” offers important and interesting historical and philological observations. Giorgio Masi, ‘‘The Nightingale in a Cage: Ariosto and the Este Court,” focuses on the presence of the Estes family in Ariosto’s production as both positive and negative reference points. Monica Farnetti, “Ariosto : Landscape Artist,” is more interested in poetic issues, and analyzes the role of landscapes in Orlando Furioso. Daniel Javitch, “The Advertising of Fictionality in Orlando Furioso,” focuses on important structural aspects of Ariosto’s poem. Elissa B. Weaver, “A Reading of the Interlaced Plot of the Orlando Furioso : The Three Cases of Love Madness,” directs her attention to another structural aspect of Ariosto’s poem: the entrelacement—the interlaced plot structure—and focuses on three specific episodes that are thematically, and linguistically structured in the same way. Roberto Fedi, “The Lyric Poetry of Ariosto,” deals with Ariosto’s Rime, very important to an understanding of Ariosto’s work. Stefano Bianchi, “The Theatre of Ariosto,” analyzes Ariosto’s theatrical production in relation to the classics, particularly Plautus. Sandro Bernardi, “From Poem to Theatre to Cinema: Luca Ronconi’s Orlando Furioso ,” considers the cinematic transposition of Ariosto’s poem. And Lucia Re, “Ariosto and Calvino: The Adventures of a Reader,” offers a close reading of Ariosto’s work in relation to that of Calvino, who was deeply inspired by Ariosto . Comprehensive and challenging, this volume contains a collection of essays that offer diverse interpretative insights and observations by important Italian and North American scholars. This book could be used both by specialized scholars who want to refine their own research on Ariosto, and by novices who want to study one of the most known authors of the Renaissance. ROSSELLA PESCATORI, Italian, UCLA Kathleen Biddick, The Typological Imaginary: Circumcision, Technology, History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2003) 148 pp., ill. One result of a cross-disciplinary approach to historical research is the opportunity it affords for the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated topics and the development of an argument that constructs a cogent and persuasive relationship among initially disparate elements. When these arguments work they speak to a particular plasticity of mind, and openness to intellectual risk that can be both informing and rewarding. Kathleen Biddick’s The Typological Imaginary: Circumcision, Technology, History offers an example of this type of unconventional and synthetic approach and the results are intriguing. Joining conceptions of historical and religious time to their perpetuation through graphic technologies and the rise of printed culture, Biddick reveals how the theological agenda of “supersession”—a conception of time where a “this is now” cuts of and supersedes a “that was then”—lies at the heart of medieval anti-Semitism (1). This conception of history that looks upon a Jewish “then” that is fulfilled by the dispensation of the Christian “now” has, according to Biddick, remained largely unexamined in Western discourse and remains an insidious element in such diverse areas as psychoanalysis and our contemporary approach to of Islamic culture. If this seems like a broad agenda, it is, and there are times when the expan- REVIEWS 187 sive nature of Biddick’s approach strains her arguments. In addition to the vast scope of Biddick’s project (covering nearly 900 years and a variety of genres) the reader must adapt to Biddick’s progressively more metaphorical use of the term “circumcision” which allows the term to progress from a synecdochal replacement of the circumcision for the individual Jewish male to a metaphorical rendering of circumcision as cutting per se. In other words, Biddick’s reading of circumcision moves from the distinctly physical to a register that is purely semantic and rhetorical (circumcision as excision, cutting, editing, removal ). This progression would be less problematic if Biddick did not insist upon a link to physiology, to a circumcision in fact. Her argument for a supersessionary construction of time underlying the emergence of the “psychoanalytic subject” in her fourth chapter entitled “History, Imaginary, Lacanian Enlightenment” is ill served by her insistence upon the central (although repressed ) role of Freud’s actual circumcision (81). Confronting circumcision as a metaphor would have strengthened Biddick’s argument that supersessionary thinking has...